Why Satoshi limited the blocksize to 1M?

[erict]

Then transaction fee goes up.

And fork fork fork forks.........

[HeRetiK]

To prevent spam transactions from bloating up the blockchain far beyond what can be properly handled by your run-of-the-mill node.

The larger the blocks, the higher the risk of orphaned blocks while mining, the greater the disadvantage for miners / mining pools with a sub-par internet connection, the greater the risk of centralization.

The larger the blockchain, the higher the requirements for running a full node, the fewer nodes, the greater the risk of centralization.

There needs to be some cost for transactions, otherwise the network gets utterly filled with spam. As they are, fees are definitely too high, but linear on-chain scaling would only get us so far. And in the end, it would likely require "forks forks forks......"

[cryptozobo]

To prevent spam transactions from bloating up the blockchain far beyond what can be properly handled by your run-of-the-mill node.

The larger the blocks, the higher the risk of orphaned blocks while mining, the greater the disadvantage for miners / mining pools with a sub-par internet connection, the greater the risk of centralization.

The larger the blockchain, the higher the requirements for running a full node, the fewer nodes, the greater the risk of centralization.

There needs to be some cost for transactions, otherwise the network gets utterly filled with spam. As they are, fees are definitely too high, but linear on-chain scaling would only get us so far. And in the end, it would likely require "forks forks forks......"

In that case, are the forks at risk of the above or have they worked out how to get around those issues?

[SuperD007]

When I asked him, he said it was cos he was high as fck on a really awesome mushroom trip and he miscalculated by a decimal place  (JUST KIDDING - before the CIA sends out a task team to find out who I am and if I know who Satoshi is...bwhhahaah)

I actually think he was merely providing us with the formula to get the ball rolling...to introduce people to the potential of the blockchain... I'm sure he was hoping that it would create a snowball effect and people would use that as the basis to develop more blockchains and to keep improving on it organically... I mean we can now even look forward to the Hashgraph as well... .. all of these developments and the insane industry disruption that is taking place is thanks to Satoshi... I actually think that he might even be one of the most influential people of the past decade... if we look at the potential blockchain has to disrupt just about everything... to take away the power and control from the minority and place it in the hands of the masses.

I would go as far as comparing Satoshi to be a modern-day Prometheus - (he stole the fire from the gods and shared it with the people)

Whoever he /she or even They are ... I will always be grateful for his/her/their contribution to the world.

[Cyberczar]

To prevent spam transactions from bloating up the blockchain far beyond what can be properly handled by your run-of-the-mill node.

The larger the blocks, the higher the risk of orphaned blocks while mining, the greater the disadvantage for miners / mining pools with a sub-par internet connection, the greater the risk of centralization.

The larger the blockchain, the higher the requirements for running a full node, the fewer nodes, the greater the risk of centralization.

There needs to be some cost for transactions, otherwise the network gets utterly filled with spam. As they are, fees are definitely too high, but linear on-chain scaling would only get us so far. And in the end, it would likely require "forks forks forks......"

In that case, are the forks at risk of the above or have they worked out how to get around those issues?

I do not think that Mr Satoshi envisaged the mining pools as we have them today. He probably limited a block to 1 MB so that some miners wouldn't have undue advantage over others. As a programmer, I'm sure he understood the future consequences of that limitation but we have to understand that at that point of inception, it was probably the best option. Increasing the blocksize should be a matter of concensus and then adding the necessary code.

[Xavofat]

It was an anti-spam limit, arguably seen by satoshi as a method of preventing DoS attacks on the Bitcoin network.

The reasoning is that without a block size limit (or with a very high one), an attacker could theoretically create huge amounts of transactions, pushing up the costs for running nodes and increasing the blockchain's size to an unnecessary extent.

However, because satoshi hasn't posted anything on the forum since late 2010, it's impossible to know what he would think of the current situation.

He did note the prospect of increasing the block size, saying that it could be phased in.  Whether or not he supported the idea of doing that is harder to say.

[dothebeats]

To prevent spam transactions from bloating up the blockchain far beyond what can be properly handled by your run-of-the-mill node.

The larger the blocks, the higher the risk of orphaned blocks while mining, the greater the disadvantage for miners / mining pools with a sub-par internet connection, the greater the risk of centralization.

The larger the blockchain, the higher the requirements for running a full node, the fewer nodes, the greater the risk of centralization.

There needs to be some cost for transactions, otherwise the network gets utterly filled with spam. As they are, fees are definitely too high, but linear on-chain scaling would only get us so far. And in the end, it would likely require "forks forks forks......"

In that case, are the forks at risk of the above or have they worked out how to get around those issues?

Surely they'd come up with some solutions about the bloated blocks due to spam attacks. When bitcoin was created, all Satoshi had in mind is that it should be able to get your money fast and cheap, but he never expected it to be big within a small amount of time. He also stated once on this forum that block size could be increased once the demand also increased. It's just a matter of finding a viable work aroud about those spam.transactions (which are happening quite a lot nowadays for someone to prove their point).

[HeRetiK]

To prevent spam transactions from bloating up the blockchain far beyond what can be properly handled by your run-of-the-mill node.

The larger the blocks, the higher the risk of orphaned blocks while mining, the greater the disadvantage for miners / mining pools with a sub-par internet connection, the greater the risk of centralization.

The larger the blockchain, the higher the requirements for running a full node, the fewer nodes, the greater the risk of centralization.

There needs to be some cost for transactions, otherwise the network gets utterly filled with spam. As they are, fees are definitely too high, but linear on-chain scaling would only get us so far. And in the end, it would likely require "forks forks forks......"

In that case, are the forks at risk of the above or have they worked out how to get around those issues?

The only BTC blockchain hardfork that increased blocksize has been BCH so far. However whether this blocksize increase will show the disadvantages as mentioned above remains to be seen as so far there are very few transactions on this network with many blocks being smaller than 100k. We'll only see the consequences in practice once the BCH chain actually runs at capacity. As far as I know BCH hasn't taken any countermeasures against the concerns mentioned above, as according to the BCH proponents those issues are either non-existent or at least negligible.

[Argoo]

If Satoshi has anticipated a gradual increase in the size of the block, then, it seems to me, it's time to increase it. Blockchein does not cope with the increased number of transactions and many rightly criticize for it bitkoy. This also leads to new forks and the creation of new clones, which, allegedly, improve these shortcomings of bitcoins.

[pooya87]

~
In that case, are the forks at risk of the above or have they worked out how to get around those issues?

no.
remember that a spam attack has many forms and has many different purposes. one of them that we are experiencing in bitcoin is to make the backlog grow and increase the fees and make it harder and harder to use bitcoin for payments because it will be expensive or will take long if you pay less.

but also it can be the "Fan Out" type of spam attack which is just increase the number of UTXO (U is Unspent not Unconfirmed) set that will cause many issues for nodes since they have to load up this set and verify transactions. and in case of increased block size it will be cheap to perform this kind of attack and a couple of other types of it such as DoS spam attacks.

this is the example of "Fan Out" spam attack during July and August of 2015 which they called "Stress Testing bitcoin"!

[bustomi]

Because i think he want that Bitcoin price was really high on the future, as we know The more rare an item the more expensive the price, so it works with bitcoin..., But the problem for us is the fees.., so sad 

[Gategold]

Then transaction fee goes up.

And fork fork fork forks.........

Probably its for limitating the number of bitcoin users. I am not sure but, there is must be good reason for it.

[AGD]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg15366

It can be phased in, like:

if (blocknumber > 115000)
    maxblocksize = largerlimit

It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete.

When we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to upgrade.