The Core Development Team’s Six Misinterpretations of Bitcoin’s Hard Fork

The problem of Bitcoin transaction congestion has been around for a long time, and it has become a consensus in the community to expand the capacity as soon as possible. However, the core team insisted on a faster pace, and regarded the 1M block size set by Satoshi Nakamoto as a golden rule, hoping to solve the problem of Bitcoin transaction congestion through a soft fork. They used various methods to suppress opponents, especially making too many wrong interpretations of hard forks.

1. Block size 1M setting

When Bitcoin was born in 2009 , Satoshi Nakamoto did not set the block size to 1M. In 2010, in order to prevent spam transactions from attacking the Bitcoin system and ensure the security and stability of the Bitcoin system, Satoshi Nakamoto set the block size to 1M. At that time, there were relatively few participants in Bitcoin, and there was no problem of Bitcoin transaction congestion. The hard fork expansion inherited Satoshi Nakamoto's legacy. However, the Bitcoin Core team (Bitcoin Core) regards 1M as a golden rule that cannot be broken.

2. Hard fork equals splitting Bitcoin

Hard fork is just a technical upgrade of the Bitcoin system, which solves the problem of Bitcoin transaction congestion and does not change the existing distribution of economic benefits. People's concerns about hard fork leading to Bitcoin split are based on the fact that Ethereum's hard fork produced two coins, Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. The Core team imposed the Ethereum split on Bitcoin's hard fork to vilify hard fork, and further demonized hard fork as splitting Bitcoin, and even believed that "hard fork is only necessary when there is a vulnerability that needs to be urgently fixed, and hard fork should never be actively carried out."

3. Hard fork blocks can be expanded infinitely

The Bitcoin Unlimited (BU) expansion plan is popular in the community, but there are some misunderstandings about it. Some people think that the Bitcoin block size can be expanded without limit, but this understanding is wrong. Bitcoin Unlimited means that the Bitcoin block size will be adjusted according to the dynamic needs of the market, not unlimited expansion.

4. Hard Fork Against Lightning Network and Segregated Witness

The hard fork that the expansionists insist on is actually not against the Lightning Network and Segregated Verification. The "Hong Kong Consensus" signed by the expansionists and the core team is the best example. However, the core team later changed their minds and refused to increase the block size to 2M. In fact, Segregated Verification can indeed solve the long-standing problem of Bitcoin transaction scalability, and the Lightning Network can share the small payments of the main chain. However, the implementation of Segregated Verification and Lightning Network requires a lot of time and is difficult to achieve in the short term. After the hard fork, Segregated Verification and Lightning Network can still be carried out, and the mutual cooperation of the three can better promote the stable development of Bitcoin.

5. Evil Chinese miners support hard forks

The voting decision of miners was designed by Satoshi Nakamoto. Miners are the guarantee of the security of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Miners have invested a lot of real money to buy mining machines for mining. They are the group of people most closely connected with Bitcoin. The cost of miners' withdrawal is very high. Once Bitcoin goes in the wrong direction, miners will be the biggest victims. For their own interests, miners make decisions after careful consideration. Miners are the most responsible group of people for Bitcoin. They will only support expansion plans that are more beneficial to Bitcoin. Miners do not have too many personal feelings for soft forks and hard forks. They are completely driven by interests. And Chinese miners are only a part of the global miners.

6. Hard forks lead to node centralization

A hard fork will break the 1M block size limit and become 2M, 4M or even larger. This will increase the transmission and storage hardware burden of network nodes. The reality is that even if the block size is 1M now, only a few people will download the full node. Most people will not choose to download the full node. Downloading the full node is completely unnecessary for most users. For those few people, no matter how big the block is, it is completely achievable as long as they need it. At most, they just need to spend more money to increase the storage space of the device. For people who play Bitcoin, this is very easy to achieve.