https://reddit.com/r/btc/comments/6o872y/behind_on_bitcoin_drama_a_short_history_of_scaling/dkg42ct/

Behind on Bitcoin Drama? A (Short) History of Scaling by Lukovka in btc

[–]jstolfi 1 point 2 days ago*

For some reason ;-) Blockstream's Pravda suddenly felt the need to post the Official Approved History of The Block Size War Scaling. Spin Doctor Peter Rizzo starts off on a good foot with a nice "sidetruth":

>    OCTOBER 8 2014 -- OCTOBER 9, 2014
>
>    SCALING ENTERS THE SPOTLIGHT
>
>    In the face of growing network use, bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen proposes increasing bitcoin's capacity by changing the network's rules.

Sorry Tovarisch, but scaling has been discussed since 2009 by Satoshi and others. It was always been clear that bitcoin would scale well enough to meet the expected demand, and that the 1 MB safety limit should be raised before it affected the operation of the network.

The Block Size War started in February 2013, when Core contributor Gregory Fulton Maxwell (/u/nullc) claimed that Satoshi's design was doomed and the salvation would be to switch to a radical redesign of his own.

Namely, Greg proposed to push all user payments to a completely different "layer 2" network (still to be designed), and restrict bitcoin to a vehicle for high-value "settlements" of the same. The capacity of bitcoin was to be intentionally restricted to be less than the demand, so those "settlement" payments would be forced to pay very high fees by means of a "fee market".

Gavin (the chief bitcoin developer at the time) and Mike Hearn rejected that plan, and insisted that the increase in the block size limit, that has been planned since 2010, was long overdue.

The next slide says

>    DECEMBER 8, 2015 -- DECEMBER 9, 2015
>
>    SEGREGATED WITNESS DEBUTS
>
>    After months of debate, developer Pieter Wuille debuts a scaling proposal called Segregated Witness. Developers are wildly positive about the proposal and its implications for future network growth.

I was in the US when the canonical American view of China, for business expediency, had to change from 1 billion treacherous criminals (as they were depicted, for example, in every other episode of Hawaii Five-O) to 1 billion industrious and friendly guys more huggable than panda bears.

As part of that spin-flipping event, PBS aired a multi-part documentary on the history and culture of China, from a very positive view. I was looking forward to see how they would handle the episode of the Opium Wars -- in which England, with help of French and US warships, invaded China and forced the government to allow the free sale of opium from British India.

But they didn't: between one sentence and the next, without breaking the narrative, the documentary jumped directly from early 19th century to early 20th century, omitting completely any reference to those wars.

Tovarisch Rizzo achieved the same feat there, skipping over the most important event of bitcoin's history since the collapse of MtGox: namely, the creation of Blockstream, their hiring of key Core developers, the defenestration or Gavin and Mike, and the imposition of Greg's two-layer redesign as the new roadmap for the project.

The "reporter" also managed to pack an amazing number of "false truths" in that little text:

>    After months of debate

There had been no public debate or announcement of SegWit before Pieter presented it as the last talk of the last of the two Blockstream-organized Bitcoin Scaling conferences. Rather, SegWit had been developed quietly by Blockstream's employee Pieter and other Blockstream staff/contractors/associates (Greg, Luke, Lombrozo) for months.

>    Pieter Wuille debuts

Not "Pieter Wuille" but "Blockstream". It became obvious that the two "Scaling" conferences were meant to be just a stage for Blockstream to present SegWit, which was just one step of their already-defined roadmap

>    a scaling proposal ... its implications for future network growth.

SegWit has nothing to do with scaling or network growth. It fixes the so-called "malleability bug" which has no impact on the network's capacity.

The proposed implementation of SegWit by Core includes a change in the rules for counting the size of a block, that is expected to be equivalent to a plain increase of the block size limit to 1.7 MB.

(Calling SegWit a "scaling proposal" is ironic given that the first thing that Greg blasted against in that February post was that increasing the block size limit would only "scale" the capacity by a constant factor.)

>    Developers are wildly positive about the proposal

People can judge by themselves whether the reactions to Pieter's talk were "wildly positive".

In fact SegWit is, by far, the most controversial change to the protocol ever. To the point that it led to open death threats against a major miner who is reluctant to accept it...