Bitcoin Block Size Debate

The limit on transactions per second is a function of the block size, currently 1 MB. Based on what the miners say, they would be interested in increasing the block size. Understand that the miners like high fees but they like high bitcoin prices even more. The fees are only a fraction of the block reward. If the system becomes too expensive then the miners will lose a lot more than just some fees.The 1 MB limit is set by the bitcoin software. The software that most everyone runs is deve

Lightning network is the fix. It essentially makes bitcoin transactions lightning channels rather than recording every transaction that ever existed. Raising the block size won't solve anything, it will only make miners store more data and transfer more data. Lighting network solves all of this, and the concept is actually pretty simple and very secure once you understand it.

Why is it an either-or situation? Couldn't they increase the blocksize and use side chains?

This is a reasonable start:https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversyFirst, most people want Bitcoin to scale such that more people can use it. This can be done directly on the blockchain by allowing more transactions to be recorded in each block. Or it could be done with '2nd layer' solutions that periodically resolve on the Bitcoin blockcha

It's not a tragedy of the commons. Whether we grow the blocks or keep them the same, the network continues to function just fine. It's a matter of values and how to grow the network. If the miners do nothing, Lightning Network and off-chain networks will route most transactions outside of the blocks. Some in the network want Bitcoin only to be used for settlement, instead of for every payment. We've actually had larger blocks in the past (32 MiB I believe) and it was reduced to co

Bitcoin is continuing to scale, but it's doing so with the Lightning Network instead of by increasing block size.I'm not super familiar with Bitcoin's tech, but that seems sensible to me. The blockchain is already 250 GB at 7 transactions per second. If you multiplied that by 100, you still have orders of magnitude less transactions per second than credit card processors, but the hardware requirements are now high enough that few individuals could afford to run full nodes.

I completely agree, increasing the maximum block size is the simplest way to scale. Bitcoin BTC refused to do that, keeping the 1 MiB maximum block size instituted by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2010 as a spam-prevention measure, which led to raising transaction fees as users compete for the scarce block space. That is also the reason why Bitcoin Cash BCH was born in August 2017: to raise the maximum block size and allow the Bitcoin blockchain to process more transactions per second while keeping fees l

Couldn't bitcoin blocks be 100 times larger? What's the drawback of huge blocks?

On-chain scaling is not sustainable. If you want to handle as many transaction as for example Visa, you would need 1 GB blocks every 10 minutes, which would make the whole blockchain heavily centralized because regular users won't be able to host full nodes to validate payments.About "adopting" and increasing block size. I think most developers agree that we would need to increase it at some point, but I believe core Bitcoin developers refusing to do it to accelerate real scala

Bitcoin blockchain has a limit of 1MB of transactions in a block. This was set in 2013, when Satoshi put it in place. He didn't give much explanation for it, but it was probably to avoid a spam attack. He said it could be raised later: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15139#msg151...There are arguments for and against increasing the blocksize.For: