Bitcoin's inability to change is how it won the blocksize war

[alonshvartsman]

Bitcoin succeeds because it proves its inability to change.
It just exists whether you like it or not and you can't control it or change the rules to your liking.
This is how Bitcoin won the blocksize war from 2015 - 2017. Below is a quick-ish and concise summary of Jonathan Bier's book on the Blocksize War. A disagreement about how large blocks of the blockchain should be, how easy it should be to change Bitcoin's rules, and ultimately it was about control.

https://www.bitrawr.com/bitcoin-block-size-debate-explained

[kaggie]

Markets rely on a mixture of stability and innovation, with stability being more important.

A monetary system that is susceptible to fast changes isn't a system worth storing large amounts of value. Who would invest long term vast sums of money in something that was unstable?

The reason that bitcoin took so long to increase  in value is that it had to prove that it was stable. This is also why it doesn't increase faster -- it still has to prove its stability. The rise and falls of bitcoin battles about its worth are questions about stability, with it balancing between people cashing in and others cashing out. The longer bitcoin exists, the more stable it has proven itself, and the more it becomes worth.

[bitmover]

Bitcoin succeeds because it proves its inability to change.
It just exists whether you like it or not and you can't control it or change the rules to your liking.
This is how Bitcoin won the blocksize war from 2015 - 2017. Below is a quick-ish and concise summary of Jonathan Bier's book on the Blocksize War. A disagreement about how large blocks of the blockchain should be, how easy it should be to change Bitcoin's rules, and ultimately it was about control.

https://www.bitrawr.com/bitcoin-block-size-debate-explained

The author is a little late. This debate was ended longago.

What won was the idea to reduce transaction size (segwit), virtually increasing blocksize up to 3 vMB 4vMB.

It makes no sense to increase block size while you can reduce transaction size. Achieving the same result with no downsides.

Bch and bsv are just scams to get people's money.

[dkbit98]

Bitcoin succeeds because it proves its inability to change.

While that may be true for block size, I would not say that Bitcoin have inability to change, because we see changes in code all the time and latest will be Taproot.

It just exists whether you like it or not and you can't control it or change the rules to your liking.

One person can't change anything in Bitcoin but he can propose things and with influence of big players, holders and miners, change is always possible,
and Like in some altcoins that tried to copy Bitcoin, we can see more centralization of mining in one or two pools.

A disagreement about how large blocks of the blockchain should be, how easy it should be to change Bitcoin's rules, and ultimately it was about control.

Everything is about control and not just in Bitcoin but anywhere where big money is involved, and for some people control is a like a drug.
Rockefeller said, ''Own nothing, but control everything.''

[khaled0111]

Bitcoin succeeds because it proves its inability to change.
It just exists whether you like it or not and you can't control it or change the rules to your liking.

This is not completely true. Bitcoin is decentralized and anyone can add any change he wants to the protocol. But for this change to take effect, he needs to convince the majority of miners and node owners to implement the new change especially if it's a major one which require a hard fork.
I'm not going to comment about the blocksize war as am not aware of all the details but what is obvious is that the community took the right decision since bitcoin is still dominating.

[hatshepsut93]

Bitcoin succeeds because it proves its inability to change.

Bitcoin already had 2 major upgrades - SegWit and Taproot, and more will be coming in the future. Bitcoin doesn't need to radically change, like adopting PoS, for example, because it already works great. Bitcoin is decentralized, and it is its greatest achievement, there's no coin more decentralized than Bitcoin, and you don't want any centralization on a network that holds hundreds of billions of value.

I think Bitcoin could "change" meaning adopt a hard fork if it was necessary, like if some unforseen circumstances demanded the change of mining algorithm or block rewards. But so far it's not needed.

[ranochigo]

Segwit is infact sometimes considered a block size increase. Segwit compatible clients includes the witness and the block size is greater than 1MB in raw size.

Any changes within Bitcoin is unfortunately marred by the politics that exists within. Miners were unwilling to adopt Segwit to further their agenda and some are still doing so today, coercing people to switch to Bitcoin Cash. MASF gave too much control to the miners without any accountability, IMO.

[dota2bestplayer]

This is a contradictory reality, yes, many people don't understand it.
When you see arrogant, narcissistic capitalism types reject Bitcoin, it is because they cannot figure out how to control it and cannot understand that this is the source of its value.
Bitcoin always wins the block size war, so the winner of the war is btc
Excellent article, thanks for sharing.

[clippers]

The reason for Bitcoin's success is that it became the first thing invented by humans but not controlled by humans. He is taking advantage of human nature. Since human beings are inherently profit-seeking and greedy, some people will continue to participate in Bitcoin mining. The fork of BCH is essentially the same, but some miners at the time believed that BCH was more valuable. Don’t worry, history will prove whose choice is correct. As long as the longest blockchain exists, BTC can won the blocksize war.