Hi Forum
Hoping you can educate me a bit here. I wasn't heavily into crypto at the time this all took place.
When the whole scaling debates began basically two solutions were proposed, which as we know lead to the creation of BCH.
Why did we not move BTC to 2MB blocks while work on the layer 2 scaling was being finalized? As I understand LN right now when a channel is closed the transactions in it get processed by the main chain, thus a bit of extra blocksize would help scale LN even more.
To me, I personally like the idea of layer 2 scaling more because of all the features it would add to BTC and new things it would make possible. I see some merit in both solutions though.
Is there a good reason apart from politics that we couldn't have just done both? It would have carried us for now until new scaling solutions are done and fully tested.
The BTC vs BCH has really split the community, yea there's some funny memes around this and all, but its not good that we are all fighting each other and getting super opinionated around this. I hope we don't see more separation in the community in the future.
P.S. lets not turn this into a BTC vs BCH argument here, make love not war
Sorry for that post above.
As you know the bitcoin code has been constantly updated with several improvements over the years as an open source project. There was a general agreement that scaling had to be achieved somehow. One side wanted a simple solution by increasing the block size. The other side was in opposition because the block size increase has a direct effect on the requirements to run a full-node. A full-node can validate the block-chain and accept or reject transactions depending on their validity. THIS "VALIDITY" is determined by the set of rules that transactions are following.
When you do a fork (Soft or Hard), you are making changes to these rules. The difference is subtle but very important.
In a soft-fork, Its not mandatory for EVERYONE to upgrade immediately. Because blocks produced under new rules will still be valid on old systems.
In a Hard-fork, It is mandatory for all systems to upgrade, otherwise the blocks produced under new rules will be invalid on old systems. This essentially creates two chains and opens up several possibilities
discussed here.
That I think is reason enough for the core developers to not want a block size and a hard fork.
You are right, in a perfect world, everybody would have agreed that a hard-fork is risky and that solutions like SegWit and LN should be implemented first. The block size increase could wait until the ecosystem was mature enough to form consensus. (On what is the safe limit for block size to keep the network decentralised enough and whether everyone is ready for a hard fork). When such a consensus would be available, a size increase could've been incorporated.
What has happened now instead is that a few powerful individuals (2 i think) have colluded to co-opt the bitcoin and scream to the whole world that they are the original. What Roger Ver is as a person is quite clear from his
"Ï am a self made millionaire", "Whats your gross annual revenue" outbursts.. He is a egoist with a lot of money and one talented but disgruntled developer to support him.
He just decided to benefit from the disgruntlement amongst the bitcoin developers and launch his own coin. That was really sad.