Bitcoin Forum

Seems all the wrong way round to me?

One concern is that increasing the block size (this way increasing the Bitcoin Blockchain size) would end up by increasing the cost to be a miner since more storage would be needed. This would limit mining to be done by only those who have hardware enough, reducing the level of decentralization of Bitcoin. Of course, it should be a problem if the cost of storage stagnates. I would love to hear other thoughts though...

It is no so much that users are against larger blocks and lower fees but rather they are against the way that the fork was planned and is happening. The fork was planned without users or developers participating in the discussion. They were not invited to the agreement signing nor were they consulted in writing the agreement. Furthermore, the fork is not even well defined with a technical specification even though it is only a month away from activating. Users are opposed to the segwit2x fork more because it represents centralization and something similar to a corporate takeover of Bitcoin. And of course, some are opposing it because they follow the Bitcoin Core developers who are opposing it for a variety of technical reasons too.

Additionally, users who wish to run full nodes may not be able to with larger blocks and thus are likely to oppose the fork.

Perfect explanation! Thank you!

User want a stable bitcoin network, s2x is not a consensus. The most important thing to be resolved is not enlarge the blocksize.

The power structure of bitcoin is decentralized. Its split between miners and developers.

Some miners wish to centralize the power structure of bitcoin so that miners control everything. To do this they needed a plan to get rid of developers, to take control of the software engineering aspect of bitcoin. That's where the agenda for big blocks comes in.

Miners started a social media campaign intended to fool the public into believing higher transfer fees and slower transactions times were the fault of core developers who "weren't doing their jobs properly by refusing to upgrade to larger blocks" in an effort to wrest control of bitcoin away from core devs.

The truth is big blocks have many negative drawbacks. They weaken the security of the blockchain. They centralize nodes. They don't provide much in the way of positive tangible returns to offset these negatives.

The entire campaign for big blocks was and is a giant scam. Antminer filled many 1MB blocks to only a fraction of their full capacity. There were many spammed transactions caused by miners to raise fees and backlog transactions. Many steps were taken to attack bitcoin and make users unhappy in an effort to influence them into blaming core devs for it.

There is an overwhelming amount of data to support this.

It wasn't the miners who wanted the bigger block size. The ones clamoring for bigger block size are those who wanted Bitcoin to be regulated and go mainstream. Miners are really opposed to lower miner's fee or transaction fees because it cannot sustain the network in the long run.

It's not about the block size but about the broader direction of Bitcoin I believe. Putting up the block size now is a very short term fix that puts off developing a real solution to a major problem.
How big is the problem? Well the Visa network has peaked at 47,000 transactions per second and so if Blockchain was to replace Visa as a transaction network then it would need to transfer 400 TB of data per day requiring a connection speed of 38Gbps (38,000 Mbps). The only way that's possible would be to stop moving data across the Internet but instead move mining into a centralised banking network and we're back to a centralised banking network.

So if we accept that something has to change to deal with this looming problem then why would miners be so against it? The suggestion is that the best solution is the Lightning Network which moves most transactions off-chain meaning there's less for miners to mine and charge for. The Lightning Network in its present form is dependent on Segwit so miners are incentivised to block the Segwit change to head off Lightning Network. AsicBoost is another aspect to all of this since it allows some mining hardware to have an unfair advantage in terms of efficiency so those miners have a double incentive to block Segwit. So the argument is made that rather than change anything big then we should just keep making the blocks bigger which allows miners profits to grow and the network to become ever more centralised.

EXCELLENT ANSWER!!!!
But it is the MEGA FARM miners not the small independants