Quote from: alani123 on August 29, 2025, 05:11:11 PM

When SegWit was about to be implemented there was a big argument about how much of a potential bandwidth and storage increase current infrastructure could support.

The politics of on-chain scaling need a bit of context for explaining because at the time the largest bulk of bitcoin mining equipment was running from China. And China still had plenty of connectivity issues at the time.

But ever since there has been rapid improvement in terms of high speed bandwidth penetration, and China is also a pioneering country in terms of 5G coverage. Moreover bitcoin mining has largely moved to the US now for various reasons. But even for China, lack of bandwidth would no longer be a problem.

Remember, this is the reason we got 2MB SegWit instead of 4!

As of on-chain storage, pruning is an accepted form of running bitcoin now. But even for storing a full chain of a few TBs, memory prices and reliability have improved a lot over the last few years. We could easily handle an increase in block size now. The technology is here.

Some might say that an increase in block size could lead to various parties exploiting this space, similarly to ordinals.

Well... If we're going to be adding changes to bitcoin's base layer that require a soft or hard fork, along with increasing the blocksize, we might as well cut off some slack like the exploits that allowed ordinals in the first place.
Many of the proposed solutions to address bitcoin scaling require forks on the base technology. Might as well just increase the block size, or just do it alongside these changes.

In my view though, if any scaling tech needs a fork to be usable, it mostly makes sense to just increase the blocksize and see if we really need further scaling along with that, before more radical changes on the bitcoin stack.

China’s gone, but US mining is MORE centralized (3 pools control 52% hash -Foundry, Marathon, Riot). Bigger blocks = higher node costs = fewer full nodes (2025 Core v25.0 data). Pruning is not equal security; bandwidth is the bottleneck (98% node saturation during peak blocks ). Ordinals reduced spam by pricing block space. Block size increase failed at NYC Summit 2025 - centralization risk > "simpler" myth. Run a node or admit you’ve never synced one and you have no idea what you are talking about.