In 2015, sipa suggested a very reasonable:

a series of block size steps, one every ~97 days, between January 2017 and July 2063, each increasing the maximum block size by 4.4%. This allows an overall growth of 17.7% per year.

Contrast this with the macroeconomics of Bitcoin in the last 8 years. Is this reasonable today?

Sipa is a brilliant man who had a foresight that was not appreciated or acknowledged at the time. I wished we had taken his guidance with the block size in 2015.

Continually working to improve Bitcoin and improve capacity, sipa suggested that by detached the claim on a transaction spend (the witness) we could fix the greatest design weakness of Bitcoin — transaction malleability. Tx mailability means someone can manipulate the raw bytes of your transaction, and it would still be consensus valid but have a different txid — and maybe even included in a block before the transaction you created, or expected, to be confirmed. This ruins accounting.

Malleability is a grave failure in a cryptosystem. It breaks assumptions that found layers that can build more complex systems that require non-malleability. Lightning, and Stacker News could not exist in the Bitcoin of 2015. Allegedly it is what took out the very first Bitcoin business, MtGox — malleability of user tx led to duplicate withdrawals (so they did double withdrawals+ but the user got valid 2x txs).

We used this with virtual byte discounts — you can inspire the user to save money on fees by using new transaction encodings. Users will adopt newer transaction encoding, which may have security advantages, if the cost savings are there. There is a good lesson in protocol design to be taken here.

Later, BIP-103 was withdrawn, and we entered a brutal civil war. Bitcoin lost one of its strongest public advocates, Roger Ver, who used his social influence to create the first great Bitcoin fork, Bitcoin Cash.

Today, Bcash is not significantly relevant, and have been technologically superseded in other Nakamoto client forks like Litecoin with mimblewimble (for tx efficiency and amount obfuscation) and Liquid (with confidential transactions and assets), et al. As a Bitcoiner, I am very disappointed we had this schism, which could have been avoided.

There are a great deal of new Bitcoiners who have do not have the scars of the block size wars, and don’t understand why we even hold the consensus logic we do.

Is it time to revaluate the parameters?