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If you think a blocksize decrease or removing the segwit discount should be considered, why do you think that would be expected to lead to an improvement? And what improvements and other effects would you expect?
I know this question wasn't directed at me, but here are my thoughts anyway:
I think that the witness discount distorts incentives, since it makes inscriptions significantly cheaper compared to any other kind of transaction. Large inscriptions also lead to bigger blocks.
If the witness discount were removed, data embedding would probably shift to the less harmful OP_RETURN outputs, since this would then be the cheapest way.
It would also reduce the blocksize and significantly reduce the transaction throughput, but blockspace demand right now is just a little less than blockspace production. So I would expect the feerates to explode again like they did in 2024 and 2017. While I’ve expected for a very long time that small payments would get priced out over time, such a move would probably make transactions very expensive immediately. What should then be the next move after that?
We are currently averaging at around 1.6 MB per block. Removing the witness discount would bring us back to 1 MB blocks. This would be a 37.5% decrease in L1 transaction throughput. Over the past week we have been seeing a ~16% reduction in block production rate. (presumably due to the US winter storm) Despite this fees are still very low. Yes, a 37.5% decrease would increase fees more, but I wouldn't go as far as saying that fees would immediately explode to levels of 2017 or April 20th 2024.
What should then be the next move after that?
After such a change L1 would probably become more of a final settlement layer and less useful for small payments. So we should focus on improving L2 scaling solutions like Lightning or Ark.
If we want to scale Bitcoin eventually then we should just keep Segwit where it is IMO. Doesn't Segwit make batched transactions + Lightning channel opens... significantly cheaper? If Bitcoin is to be better adopted in the future... the extra blockspace/scaling (without changing anything currently) would be really helpful...
My point is that if people are concerned about spam/data graffiti then by raising fees they get less graffiti. Either you increase demand for blockspace... or decrease throughput
Way cleaner and less controversial than Knots/Bip alternatives being proposed today IMO
Thanks.
I’m not worried about blocksize or blockchain growth. When Segwit was activated, it was with the understanding that it was a blocksize increase that allowed blocks to be up to 4 MB.
The blockchain only grew by about 83.5 GB in 2025. That’s an average blocksize of about 1.57 MB (53,082 blocks in 2025).
For comparison, it grew by 88.7 GB in 2024 and 92 GB in 2023.
Blockchain size in bytes on Dec 31:
The UTXO set also shrank in count in 2025 (after growing significantly between 2023-04 and 2024-07):
TBH, a lot of the narratives seem pretty decoupled from what’s actually happening.
If you think a blocksize decrease or removing the segwit discount should be considered, why do you think that would be expected to lead to an improvement? And what improvements and other effects would you expect?