Post
Topic
Board Speculation
Re: The hardfork will make Gavincoin plummet to zero
by
DeathAndTaxes
on 07/02/2015, 17:48:26 UTC
Fuck sakes, if Satoshi was so smart why the hell didn't he add 20 MB by default? he would have saved us from this mess. Geeeeez.

Satoshi had no limit on block sizes at all.   From block 1 it was legal to have a 2MB, 20MB, even 33MB block.   There was a 33.5MB limit on message length and since blocks are transmitted as a single message it would have limited blocks to only 33.5MB but even this wasn't a hard limit as new message type could have been added which transmitted blocks in other ways (i.e. header & txn hashes vs full transactions).

The 1MB "limit" was added as a temporary anti-spam measure 18 months later.   There was no voting, no significant discussion, and the commit wasn't made by Satoshi.  It actually was combined with a bunch of other unrelated changes and not even well documented at the time.  There is nothing which indicates this was a core design decision that Bitcoin would perpetually be limited to 1MB.