For the Curious But Perplexed, the Bitcoin ‘Halving’ Explained Two recent essays have made the argument for retaining the one-megabyte limit on the size of bitcoin blocks, which limits the number of transactions the network can process. These contributions help reveal something that the technically oriented bitcoin community doesn’t focus on very much: the block size debate is about human values. The debate will be less acrimonious if bitcoin community leaders surface and compare these values.
In a July 3 opinion piece on CoinDesk, Ariel Deschapell wrote frankly about the constraint that a one-megabyte block size may put on adoption. "A consumer using bitcoin for the first time and running into a severe confirmation delay for a retail transaction might very well get turned off," he wrote. That very thing recently happened to New York Times reporter Nathaniel Popper, who shared his experience widely .
But to Deschapell, the daily spending use case is "largely a dream." Today’s use case, he wrote, is investment. Everyday spending of bitcoins will wait at least until investment growth brings bitcoin’s still-significant volatility under control, he argued.
In a similar commentary on the blog of the Foundation for Economic Education , Vivek Rajasekhar echoed Deschapell on the minimal use case for payments with reference to fees, which have risen under the transaction-throughput limit.
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"[T]here’s little evidence," Rajasekhar wrote, "that bitcoin’s users are concerned about the cost of using the network." And later: "cheap is not what bitcoin’s real users are looking for."
While their observations are accurate, Deschapell’s and Rajasekhar’s embrace of the status quo in bitcoin use struck me. […]
