It's pretty mind boggling that many people in the Bitcoin community would rather split the blockchain and the community in order to prevent a measly blocksize increase to 2mb. While the "official" reason for opposing such an increase is that 2mb blocks are unsafe or will cause centralization, this reason is 100% bullshit . What follows are five reasons that are probably much closer to the truth.

1) Conflicts of interest.

Blockstream, for example, was founded by people who believed Bitcoin Cannot Scale™ and thus would need offchain solutions if people are to be able to transact. Behaving like entrepreneurs they founded a company to create and sell these offchain solutions to meet this perceived market need. Conflicts of interest arose when it turned out there wasn't much consumer demand for their products since people were able to efficiently transact without their solutions. Thus they engaged in a form of rent seeking ― trying to choke off the bitcoin blockchain to create an artificial demand for their products.

2) Full node fetishism

Something like 99% of bitcoin users do not run a full node. The resources needed to process 1mb blocks probably has little to do with it since most people have more than enough bandwidth and CPU to validate 1mb, 2mb, 8mb or larger blocks on their home computers. A more likely reason is very few people want to run a server full time on their desktops or laptops just to make payments. This is likely the same reason nobody runs their own Email server despite it being much more lightweight than a full node.

Yet small blockers insist that those not running full nodes are Not True Bitcoiners™ or Not Using Bitcoin™. Which, of course, is absurd. The lack of any data points showing even a single person who has been defrauded when accepting a bitcoin payment without using a full node has not deterred them from claiming that anything but a full node is horrifically insecure. Thus we need to make sure the blocksize remains at 1mb so that the 99% who don't currently run full nodes will be able to run them on their 8 year old Windows 7 laptops when they wake up from their stupor and realize how much better running a home server is for them. We also need to make sure that the [NO2X] millennial living in his parent's basement can continue to fully validate the $20 Bitcoin purchase he makes each month.

3) Censorship & Propaganda

The admins of the Bitcoin subreddit are deleting somewhere around 6,000 comments and posts per month in a desperate attempt to control the narrative. Newcomers are greeted with an echo chamber of drones and sock puppets engaged in their daily Two Minutes of Hate directed at Roger Ver, Jihan Wu or anyone who innocently stumbles in there an says they support a blocksize increase. They are lead to believe that a coalition of 58 companies located in 22 countries, 83.28% of hashing power, 5.1 billion USD monthly on chain transaction volume, and 20.5 million bitcoin wallets amounts to a "corporate takeover" and are told not to ask why a single AXA funded company desperately trying maintain a monopoly of protocol development is not a "corporate takeover".

4) Groupthink

You can find a number of comments like this one from Core developer Pieter Wuille in the early days of Bitcoin.

First of all, my opinion: I'm in favor of increasing the block size limit in a hard fork, but very much against removing the limit entirely. [...] My suggestion would be a one-time increase to perhaps 10 MiB or 100 MiB blocks (to be debated), and after that an at-most slow exponential further growth.

If you go back far enough you'll find that most present day small blockers were once reasonable people and would easily have supported a 2mb increase. Adam Back even proposed 2-4-8 at one point. But if you track opinion over time you see a steady deterioration as groupthink set in. Sentiment went from, "I support a large (8, 10, or 20 mb) blocksize increase" to..

"Of course we need a blocksize increase, we just need to do it responsibly and not phase it in too fast" to..

"8mb seems to risky to me, I think we'd be better off with 2 or 4" to.. "We can probably wait a year or so before 2mb" to.. "No bocksize increase is needed for the foreseeable future" to.. "You'll get a blocksize increase over my dead body!".

5) Increasing Price

The price increase in Bitcoin has likely made many early adopters very rich changing their motivation from a desire to see Bitcoin achieve widespread adoption to a desire to preserve their principal. Nowhere can this be seen more than in the recent attempt to re-brand Bitcoin as a "store of value" first and foremost. Today it's common to hear small blockers admit that they don't actually use Bitcoin for anything. They just sit on it and share moon memes. It's why when Adam Back hints at $100 transaction fees small blockers just nod and say, yeah that seems about right for an asset that you only pull out from under your mattress and trade once per decade. And sadly, all the increasing price does is give them a false belief that they are correct.











