Episode notes
The Blocksize Wars were supposed to be over. They aren't.
On this episode of Hell Money, Casey Rodarmor and Erin Redwing begin a new series on Bitcoin history by going back to the opening shots of the Blocksize Wars. We get into Satoshi’s 1 MB limit, the rise of Gavin Andresen, BIP-101, Bitcoin XT, the first big blocker/small blocker split, and the increasingly messy question of Bitcoin consensus.
Erin also starts arriving at a dangerous conclusion: the big blockers may have been right about some of the problems. Casey explains why their proposed solution was still worse, and we argue about scarce block space, RBF, fee markets, full nodes, social consensus, institutional adoption, and why so many supposedly settled debates keep resurfacing in Ordinals and BIP-110.
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TIMESTAMPS
0:00 The Blocksize Wars
3:55 Bitcoin Prehistory: Satoshi's 1MB Block Size Limit
6:15 Gavin Andresen: Satoshi's Chosen Successor
8:29 Bitcoin Foundation, Greg Maxwell's Blockstream & the Handover to Wladimir
9:36 BIP 101: Gavin Andresen's 8MB Hard Fork Proposal
12:28 Peter Wuille's BIP 103: The Rejected Compromise
14:22 Bitcoin XT: Mike Hearn & Gavin Andresen's Hard Fork Client
16:15 Theymos Infinity Snaps r/Bitcoin
20:28 BitPay, Circle, BitGo, & Other CEOs Back BIP 101
22:01 Reading Satoshi's Tea Leaves
28:25 Big Blocks vs Small Blocks: The Core Arguments
29:11 RBF vs First Seen Safe: Peter Todd's Controversy
34:08 The Highway Analogy: Fee Markets vs More Lanes
39:15 Scaling Bitcoin Montreal 2015: Gavin vs One Meg Greg
46:00 What If Big Blocks Won?
49:45 Big Blockers vs Communists: Right Diagnosis, Wrong Cure
53:30 Greg Maxwell vs Gavin Andresen: Open vs Private Discourse
1:03:55 Economic Nodes vs Miners: Who Controls Bitcoin?
1:07:50 What Is Bitcoin Consensus?
