What makes BCH and BSV shitcoins is a plethora of reasons other than just having bigger blocks. Mind you, bitcoin was very close to having double the block capacity it has now when SegWit got activated. It was called SegWit2x. And in the end even without the 2x part, bitcoin went from 1MB blocks to 4MB. So it BTC a shitcoin as well?
No! Because bitcoin has a community, some fragments of democracy (unlike the two aforementioned coins that are self centered projects), the best developers, the biggest and most active community.
Sure, but this topic is strictly about the block size. No?
Should I also mention the sad fact about BSV implementing censorship/coin confiscation features?
There you go:
https://twitter.com/BobSummerwill/status/1577714409618931713https://github.com/bitcoin-sv/bitcoin-sv/releases/tag/v1.0.13I don't understand the point then. If you agree that BCH and BSV are shitcoins for reasons other than the blockchsize increase, what makes you be against block size increases then?
If bitcoin increases its block capacity it wouldn't make it lose all that makes it good, right?
The biggest hurdle remains that those running non-mining nodes carry the burden of helping to secure the chain while receiving no economic reward. They gain benefits like privacy and not relying upon trusting others. But, financially, there's no recompense for the service they provide. As such, they will only offer to carry a greater burden at a time of their choosing and not merely when others complain about it.
Make all the arguments about decentralisation, propagation and politics you want, but all those points largely fall by the wayside the moment you start asking others to do more than they're already doing, just so it might benefit you and give you lower tx fees.
When the majority of nodes are willing, that's when it'll happen.
If we are to examine the specs of those running a bitcoin full node right now, how many would 100% be unable to sync with a block size increase? And what would cause it? If let's say the block size goes from 4 MB now to 8 MB, maybe a concern would be CPU power. But bitcoin core already works great with even the weaker CPUs. The only requirement listed in
bitcoin.org is for the CPU to be above 1GHz. These days it's actually hard to find a CPU that old for sale.
The other requirement might be disk space. Well with even the maximum expansion of 4 MB per 10 minutes, the BTC blockchain can't grow more than 210240 MB a year (525600 minutes in a year / 10 minute block time * 4 MB block capacity). So a 2 fold increase could generate 400GB blockchain files in a year at MAXIMUM utilization. Honestly it's not that bad. Disk space is very cheap when we talk about these sizes. A 1 TB HDD costs 20$ new now.
And also one does not need to store the full historical record of transactions to host a trustless node. A node without the full blockchain stored can still produce trustless network information so long as it's connected to the network.
The biggest issue might be bandwidth. Currently bitcoin.org lists 15 GB/month as a requirement to run bitcoin core. Many parts of the world have slow internet but honestly 15 GB a month is nothing.
What connection speed translates to 15 GB a month. Let's see. 15 GB is 120000 Megabits. If you divide 120k to the seconds in a month, you get 0.04566 Mbits per second or 45.66 Kilobits. Speeds such low aren't even commercially available anymore. 2g and EDGE connections have been taken out of commision in most places for at least 3 years now and so has been ISDN/Dial up etc.. Anyone with signal or an internet connection to his residence should be able to run a bitcoin node reliably even if the bandwidth requirement was increased 10 fold.
And all that IF the blocksize increase is utilized fully (which is unlikely to happen imminently)
tl;dr my calculations show that even with a substantial block size increase at full utilization most hosting a bitcoin node won't need to upgrade their infastracture. And those that will probably will still be able to host a node by spending an extra 50$ maximum once.