I'll start by dedicating this thread to stompix (honestly, no hate, debate with him is enjoyable even though we sometimes disagree) who dared me to make this thread.
Be my guest to open a topic about increasing the capacity, I'm grabbing my popcorn!
Common, do it, I can't wait for it!
It's already 2023 now and I think having a taboo over mere discussion of block capacity shouldn't be shunned or considered taboo.
Continuing the debate:
As for me, I was just this week shown how it's physically impossible to have blocks larger than 4MB because only nodes that own a Titan computer and their own private global fiber optic cables would be able to cope with larger blocks!
Well well well... This is an age old arguement.
Quoting my post that I also linked in the OP:
The concerns over big and dynamic blocks in 2015It's important to not forget what the talking points for each proposed solution were back when it was decision time.
In early 2016, Jonas Schnelli, a full time bitcoin Core maintainer, was quoted stating the following against 2MB blocks.
There are consequences with 2-megabyte blocks. Chinese miners -- they are now [for] 2- megabyte blocks, but maybe it will turn out to be a problem for them . . . Every second really counts . . . When you mine a block that is no longer valid and you don’t get the information that a new block is here, you’re wasting lots of energy. If it’s just ten seconds you mine on the wrong block, you lose energy, and you lose coins in the end. That’s why, with Chinese miners [especially], every second counts, and [with] 2-megabyte [blocks], it’s twice the bandwidth you need.
In this quote its easy to see how conservative bitcoin developers sought to be with the blockchain size, and how an increase in block size might severely affect the decentralization of bitcoin due to bandwidth constraints in many parts of the world. Contrary to the path projects like Ethereum have followed by having a full blockchain size in the terrabytes, bitcoin still chooses to form its network with full nodes. Users of bitcoin can still to this day download and easily synchronize the full blockchain therefore also contributing to decentralization. This lack of compromise is what has defined bitcoin through the years.
Yet, in the end, we got 4MB blocks and still no super computers are needed. It's probably safe to say that even higher max block size increases could be easily accommodated by a run in the mill home computer. Moore's law is still a thing. Computing and storage space becomes cheaper. So, surpassing 1MB blocks didn't destroy BTC. Even 4MB blocks didn't. But now, so many years after 2015, storage, memory and computing power are cheaper than ever. So this argument doesn't stand.
But what do you know! It doesn't even matter if bitcoin full node requirements are raised. Why? Because decentralization doesn't necessarily guarantee trustlessness and immutability. And in a way, mining nodes are already way fewer and with much higher requirements than normal network nodes. So we've already been beyond the point where maximizing decentralization mattered ever since ASICs were introduced for bitcoin. Even satoshi admitted to such:
The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server. The design supports letting users just be users. The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be. Those few nodes will be big server farms. The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don't generate.
Besides, 10 minutes is too long to verify that payment is good. It needs to be as fast as swiping a credit card is today.
See the snack machine thread, I outline how a payment processor could verify payments well enough, actually really well (much lower fraud rate than credit cards), in something like 10 seconds or less. If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3819But people often forget that satoshi didn't romanticize decentralization over trustlessness and immutability. Instead only this part of the quote became famous.
If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry.