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The Blocksize War: The battle for control over Bitcoin’s protocol rules

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This book covers Bitcoin’s blocksize war, which was waged from August 2015 to November 2017. On the surface the battle was about the amount of data allowed in each Bitcoin block, however it exposed much deeper issues, such as who controls Bitcoin’s protocol rules. It is not possible to cover every twist and turn in the labyrinthine conflict or all the arguments, but I have provided a chronology of the most significant events. This book explores some of the major characters in the conflict and includes coverage, from both the front lines and behind the scenes, during some of the most acute phases of the struggle. The account in this book includes discussions with the key players from both sides during the war, exploring their motivations, strategy and thought processes as the exhausting campaign progressed and developed.

220 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 14, 2021

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Jonathan Bier

6 books15 followers

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Displaying 1 - 30 of 66 reviews
Profile Image for Murtaza .
680 reviews3,393 followers
April 18, 2021
For those who are pretty far down the Bitcoin rabbit hole this is a history of how the currency split into two several years ago, Bitcoin itself and a forked version called Bitcoin Cash. The dispute fundamentally came down to whether Bitcoin is intended to be used for merchant adoption and payments or something more like a precious metal that is stored for value. Those who favored maintaining the original code of small transaction blocks ultimately prevailed, and Bitcoin is characterized today as "digital gold," rather than a dollar bill that you might buy your coffee with. The prose here is undramatic and plain and the author does not waste time explaining what Bitcoin is to a layperson: This is for real crypto nerds and I found that even as someone with basic knowledge of the subject it was still challenging to follow at points. I'd like to work more with people in this field in the future however and when you're getting to know any group of people a good way to build rapport is to know and respect their history and cherished texts. As such I recommend this to people deeply interested in Bitcoin and crypto generally. As the battle over modifying the code shows, this is something that goes deep to the heart of people's beliefs over the world they'd like to create.
Profile Image for Susheendhar Vijay.
5 reviews2 followers
June 20, 2021
The book reads like a thriller. A civil war fought over the definition of Bitcoin really helps pin down the fundamental values of such a system. Also a look at how a leaderless organization can make decisive decisions.

The author was personally present in almost of all of the significant events and gave dope personal accounts. Easy to read no bullshit.

Highly recommended if you have a working knowledge of Bitcoin.
Profile Image for Tom Menner.
50 reviews1 follower
November 2, 2021
Very technically dense and dry, somewhat biased

As someone who works in the blockchain industry, I was looking forward to an interesting retelling of Bitcoin history. Unfortunately I think this book is written for the hardcore Bitcoin enthusiast. It is technically very dense and dry, and it assumes the reader has a lot of background knowledge in this space. Furthermore, while I believe the author did his best to present both sides of a difficult and contentious technical and governance debate, in the end he does come off as being much more sympathetic and appreciative of one side over the other. In the end, this book is only for those who are very technically proficient in Bitcoin and want to learn a bit about the history of its development, and is not in any way meant for the casual reader.
Profile Image for Foad Ansari.
250 reviews38 followers
March 11, 2023
The Block Size War is a book written by cryptocurrency expert and author, Andreas M. Antonopoulos. The book is a comprehensive look at the debate over the size of Bitcoin's blocks, which is a key factor in determining the scalability of the network. The book examines the various arguments for and against increasing the block size, as well as the implications of the debate for the future of Bitcoin. It also looks at the history of the debate, the various stakeholders involved, and the potential solutions that have been proposed. The book is an essential read for anyone interested in the future of Bitcoin and the blockchain technology that underpins it.
Profile Image for Mikko Ikola.
47 reviews7 followers
August 24, 2021
The Blocksize War book reads like a thriller, it was hard to put down. Easy five stars.

If you are already feet deep in the crypto world but started to follow the space after the Bitcoin Cash fork (2017), this is a must read book. This book is the history of Bitcoin with all twists and turns explained, and how key figures from the industry sided either with the small blockers (prioritizing security) or larger blockers (prioritizing payment scalability and merchant adoption).

However, if you are new to the world of Bitcoin and blockchain I wouldn’t recommend The Blocksize War as your first book. Not even as a second or third book. It’s better to start with Bitcoin Standard book (Ammous Saifedean) or Layered Money book (Nik Bhatia).

One might think that the history of Bitcoin is fairly simple and straight-forward. After all, the protocol has remained fairly similar with only limited amount of upgrades. However, behind the scenes there’s been a massive fight between the “small blockers” and “large blockers”.

Here’s some juice takeaway snippets and learnings from the book:

- In 2010, the Bitcoin Core developer Gavin Andersen purchased 20,000 Bitcoin for 50 USD. He then created a faucet, or a website, where people would just need to fill in Captcha and they would receive 5 BTC free of charge to play around. That was nice.

- In 2011, the entire ecosystem consisted of just one piece of software, the Bitcoin client. It was Microsoft Windows program, comprised of the wallet, full node and miner. All in one.

- In the early days of Bitcoin, there was no block size limit, and it was likely that block sizes over 32 MB would have probably broken the system.

- The first limit was introduced in July 15, 2010, when Satoshi added the following line of code to the software depository: MAX_BLOCK_SIZE = 1000000. This limit came into force on September 7, 2010. This was called soft fork.

- Soft fork and Hard fork, what’s the difference exactly? Soft fork means adding or lowering the limit tighten the rules. Increasing the limit would relax the rules and is therefore known as a hard fork.

- However, this softfork/hardfork terminology was not known at the time and was only used as of April 2012.

- Gavin Andersen was the lead of the Bitcoin project after Satoshi left. He had lot of respect from the community. He did lot of great contributions to Bitcoin. However, later he supported Bitcoin XT and endorsed people to run it. Had anyone else in the community done that, the impact would have not been significant and probably none of the events which followed would have occurred.

- Bitcoin XT would activate 8 MB blocks that would double in size every two years. The new maximum TPS (Transactions Per Second) would have been 24. Normal Bitcoin with 1 MB block size had a TPS rate of around 3.

- It is widely quoted that Satoshi disappeared already in April 26, 2011 from the Bitcoin community by saying in his final email that he had “moved on to other projects”. However, Satoshi did reappear to contribute one email in 2015, the day when Bitcoin XT was published. He basically supported the small blockers argument and said that his earlier comments had been interpreted in wrong way, and also that some of his opinions had slightly changed, considering how much the space have evolved.

- It is hard to tell if the message from Satoshi in 2015 was truly Satoshi himself. His 1) Vistomail email could have been hacked, or 2) Vistomail’s admins might have written the email or 3) It genuinely was Satoshi himself. The author comes to fair conclusion that at the end of the day it didn’t matter which was the case. Bitcoin had already grown to such a large extent that one influential guy, even Satoshi himself, could not influence the protocol that much anymore

- Bitcoin scaling was discussed in numerous conferences around the world, e.g. in Hong Kong, New York, Netherland, Italy.

- For ‘large blockers’ camp Bitcoin was all about merchant adoption and 2015 had been a period of huge success. In 2015, Microsoft, Dell, Rakuten, Overstock, TigerDirect among other large corporations had started accepting Bitcoin as a payment in a form or another. In 2016, also the video game store Steam started accepting Bitcoin.

- However, for ‘small blockers’ Bitcoin was not a business, nor a payment system taking on VISA, PayPal and MasterCard. It was a new form of money, something far more ambitious and potentially far more transformational to society and the economy. It was taking central banks. Small blockers had nothing against Bitcoin becoming a fast and cheap payment system; it just came second behind their main priority, which was a robust and new form of money.

- SegWit was technically superior solution. It enabled more transaction without growing the block size. However, many people from the large blockers camp had skepticism towards it, mostly because it was extremely complicated to understand. Even some of the main developers and small blockers didn’t quite understand it in the beginning.

- In 2015 the block size war intensified considerably. There was even DDoS attach against Bitcoin XT nodes, bringing down entire (rural) ISP. Several cities were left without internet access for several hours. That discouraged running Bitcoin XT nodes and also showed its vulnerability compared to Bitcoin, which has much more nodes distributed around the world

- Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, had controversial views in the early days. He also supported the large block size in 2016 and Bitcoin XT. His tweets regarding this matter is now deleted.

- One of the other big supporter of larger blocks was Jihan Wu, the CEO of Bitmain at the time. Bitmain is the manufacturer of ASIC mining rigs, and thus a powerful stakeholder in the space.

- When Bitcoin XT was dead, Bitcoin Classic appeared. It was a simple proposal to increase the block size from 1 MB to 2 MB, something much more conservative than Bitcoin XT. Bitcoin Classic got lot of support from the industry, such as Coinbase and Bitmain.

- There was lot of heated debates in the conferences. Many of the conversation with the key players in the industry lasted until early morning hours, when people in the room wanted to agree on a written statement that would be published with everyone’s names under it. Prolonging the discussions all the way until 5 am, it was similar situation and tactic that is commonly used in international treaty negotiations to force sides into an agreement.

- However, the written statement agreed in Hong Kong roundtable in Feb 20, 2016 had many conflicting points, and they also left room for interpretation

- The ‘Fake Satoshi’ was a wild story in May 2, 2016 when Gavin Andersen, the main developer behind Bitcoin Core, released a blog post stating that he has been convinced beyond reasonable doubt that Satoshi Nakamoto was an Australian man called Craig Steven Wright. Gavin claimed he had seen cryptographic proof of this in London.

- Craig Wright could have provided simple cryptographic proof if he really was a Satoshi. For example, Gavin could have written a simple message and encrypt it with Satoshi’s public key, and then Craig could have read it by decrypting the message with Satoshi’s private key (that he claimed to possess). However, this type of solid proof was never provided

- For most people, Craig Wright appeared to be a typical conman, however some large blockers seemed to believe him and he was invited as speaker to some large blocker events.

- However, it was clear from many data points that this guy was not Satoshi. It was bad misjudgment from Gavin Andersen, and he took a big hit to his reputation. His Github commit access was also revoked.

- The book also described the event of Ethereum hard fork with interesting details to it. I won’t summarize the Ethreum hardfork in this review. However, Ethereum hard fork definitely had an impact on the thinking behind Bitcoin community as well.

- After Bitcoin Classic was dead and didn’t work out, there was an another proposal, Bitcoin Unlimited (BU). BU proposed dynamic block size that would be signaled by the users. This would allow finding the limit having a majority consensus and miners automatically tracking the largest proof-of-work, regardless of the block size. (So-called EC or Emergent Consensus mechanism)

- Bitcoin Unlimited also had large support from key players, such as Gavin Andersen, Brian Armstrong, Jihan Wu, Roger Ver, and some mining pools such as ViaBTC, GBMiners, and BTC.TOP.

- Bitcoin Unlimited had a bug (that had nothing to do with the blocksize) and this was exploited crashing most of the Bitcoin Unlimited nodes and bring down the credibility of the proposed hard fork.

- After Bitcoin Unlimited failed, some group large blockers mostly in Hong Kong / China even amassed 100M USD to potentially attack the smaller block chain community. The idea was to spend money on energy, mining empty blocks, and orphaning any blocks with transactions. This was a simple retaliation attempt. It was unclear if any of these plans were actually executed.

- On April 5, 2017, another bombshell was off. Some of the miners had a figured out secret mining optimization (‘ASICBoost’), a proof-of-work shortcut that would not work if block contained SegWit transactions. The reason to oppose SegWit, according to this info, was not its complexity, but simply to protect miners’ profitability. Miners even tried to patent this ASICBoost technology.

- Most of the small blockers had a secret coordination channel on Slack called ‘dragonsden’. This was reveled when Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent, was giving a video presentation on January 2017. During the presentation, a Slack channel accidentally popped up on his screen.

- SegWit first activated on Litecoin in May 2017. Price of Litecoin sharply rallied. Partly due to the excitement over SegWit, partly because of coordinated strategy from small blockers buying LTC and causing a price spike.

- On May 22, 2017 there was a conference in New York. This resulted in yet another agreement and public statement, so called New York Agreement (NYA).

- After many failed attempts (Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Classic, Bitcoin Unlimited), Bitcoin Cash finally launched. Bitcoin Cash had 8 MB block size, did not have SegWit, and did not have “Replace By Fee” feature. It did have ‘replay’ and ‘wipeout’ protection.

- When Bitcoin was hard forked to Bitcoin Cash, all Bitcoin holders essentially received equivalent amount of Bitcoin Cash. However, if you had your BTC in exchange, you didn’t receive free BCH.

- Bitcoin Cash seemed to gather wide support from the large blockers camp. The price of Bitcoin Cash instantly plummeted, by almost 20 percent. In longer term BCH seemed to settle somewhere between 7 to 15 percent of the Bitcoin price

- What used to be a Cold War was now a public hot war.

- Small blockers had a sophisticated strategy against to Bitcoin Cash. They encouraged people not to sell their Bitcoin Cash. They aimed to keep the Bitcoin Cash priced around 7 percent that of Bitcoin. Otherwise, if Bitcoin Cash price would drop to say 1 percent that of Bitcoin, the large blockers could amass huge amount of BCH, corner the market, rally the price, and make huge profits. And later use these profits to amass significant size of the actual Bitcoin market. “Make them pay” was a popular phrase thrown around in Dragons Den and elsewhere at the time.

- Later, Bitcoin Cash further split to Bitcoin ABC (Adjustable Blocksize Cap) and Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV). Bitcoin ABC wanted a block limit of 32 MB while BSV wanted a block limit of 128 MB. BSV was endorsed by fake-Satoshi Craig Wright.

- Just as the small blockers had predicted, if split happens, the splits might happen again, diminishing the credibility of all split coins. This is exactly what happened.

- In early 2021, Bitcoin Cash traded at around one percent of the price of Bitcoin. It was widely recognized as a not successful outcome.

- Looking back, a moderate block size limit increase hard fork, to buy capacity for few more years, might have been a good path to take. The block size wars could have been avoided and Bitcoin would be even more popular what it is today. However, we will never know this for sure.

- Money is ultimately a collective confidence game, and the small blockers proved themselves to be quite effective players of the game, and for this they were rewarded with their victory.

- However, there is no guarantee user-controlled money characteristics will persist forever. The block size war might have been just a dry run for the challenges to come, when the primary beneficiaries of the centrally-controlled monetary systems finally realize the potential of user-driven money and they may not like it. These future battles may be over censorship resistance, rather than scaling and the block size limit. This time, the financial and political establishment are likely to initiate the conflict.

- The outcome here is far from certain. However, at least for now, the dream of a world where ordinary people have ultimate and direct control over the rules that govern their money, lives on.
Profile Image for Blake.
76 reviews4 followers
June 6, 2022
This book helped me make more sense of what was a very confusing situation that I first became aware of in 2017. Back then I didn’t really get the argument against larger blocks, hard forks, and not getting the right level of consensus. I even remember getting very spooked by Mike Hearn’s rage quite the year before - not because I really understood the nuance of his frustration, or why he was ultimately incorrect, but because it seemed like the whole idea of Bitcoin was unravelling.

Since then I’ve come to appreciate the mechanics of how Bitcoin is run by the users, and not miners or large institutions, and I find it utterly fascinating in a world where so many things are driven by top down decree.

This book really helped to firm up this appreciation, and also made me realise even more how special Bitcoin is (whether or not it goes to $100k or $100 per 1 btc). The author presents the situation very clearly, and fairly, and is able to add significant insight since he was present at many of the key moments during the “war”. He makes sense of a very complex situation in a very novel domain.

It’s a relatively short book and well worth the effort to get a grounding in one of the most important periods in Bitcoin history. Whether or not you want to use Bitcoin yourself or not, it’s a worthwhile read just for the amazing David vs. Goliath type story.
1 review
March 17, 2021
A fantastic book offering a prime account of one of the most tumultuous yet defining periods in Bitcoin's young history. The author eloquently recalls all the major main and side events from this "battle". It's a gripping narration from the start until the pinnacle in the summer/fall of 2017. For those who were already part of Bitcoin back then, it’s a nice trip down memory lane. With the benefit of hindsight, it becomes clear that the outcome of the blocksize war was far from certain and how even some altcoins were offering more learnings by proxy than the average bitcoin enthusiast might admit at first. For those who joined Bitcoin after 2017, the book offers valuable insights explaining how we got here and why the defining beneficial properties of the Bitcoin protocol are *not* guaranteed by default.
I’m hopeful this book ensures the many lessons from Bitcoin’s heavily conflicted coming of age period (2015-2017) won’t be easily forgotten.
38 reviews
January 30, 2023
The antidote for anytime someone says Bitcoin is controlled by:

- a small group of 'shadowy super coders'
- the miners
- the mining pools
- the people that make the mining rigs
- the centralized exchanges

I wouldn't recommend it to someone with zero knowledge of Bitcoin. But if you are already in or entering the weeds, it is candy. Listened to it twice back to back.
Profile Image for Seth.
598 reviews
February 20, 2023
Not for the faint of heart. This is a deep and very technical dive into the esoteric (but extremely important) debates inside the Bitcoin community from 2015-2017 over the block size in the protocol. Fortunately, the “small blockers” won, and Bitcoin stands a real chance of becoming the base layer freedom money to the world. The author is not a very good writer, and this book desperately needed an editor.
Profile Image for Nilesh Jasani.
1,051 reviews187 followers
June 28, 2021


The Blocksize War has a lot to offer, whether one is a crypto-fan or a skeptic. Even if the reader is unable to follow many technical details, the book's utterly novel content will provide fodder for many different thoughts about views on where Bitcoin could be going. The author is thorough, extremely knowledgeable, engaging, and refreshingly balanced.

The following are my takeaways based on what I learned from the book. They are not the conclusions drawn by the author or even intended by him. A critic may argue that some of the takeaways were already formed in my mind, and I use the book's contents conveniently to spout them here. Still, here they are:

a. Bitcoin is not stagnant
For an involved fan, there may not be anything nothing new in this conclusion. However, most commoners who learn about Bitcoin from popular media tend to believe the coin as immutable as gold, if not more. Its biggest proponents' incessant pounding of the 21 million limit cement this myth. The book provides a comprehensive peek at how the coin miners and developers constantly work under the hood to make adjustments. Bitcoin is remotely not a finished product.

b. Bitcoin's evolution has been and will be messy
Can you build a bridge when one takes a vote on how every component should be laid or develop any software where every code needs to be approved by a majority? Could even Satoshi - whomever he/she/they is - on the first version of Bitcoin if every line of his visionary White Paper was debated before any execution? The libertarian roots of the coin have consigned it to a messy evolution. Some may proclaim, in well-intended and well-sounding ways but without proof that such democratic ways are better than any other centralized ways. Still, it has exposed the coin to turn technologically antiquated. Ethereum will not be the last beneficiary of Bitcoin's inability to change radically to accommodate new needs or demands despite the coin's genesis on the same principle in 2008.

c. Ironically, conservatism to rule this libertarian dream project!
In other words, this radical, libertarian haven has created its own quagmire from where there is no easy way out. Even if the whole community agrees that something in the construct of the coin needs a change, if the proposed solutions are more than one, the competing parties will keep fighting on their divergent solution thoughts in extremely early stages. There will not be enough data at such initial stages to prove which claims are comprehensively right or wrong. As a result, both parties will agree to remain with what they can agree on despite being suboptimal (a form of tragedy of commons) or dissent out, leaving the main coin that much worse for it if those ideas turn out to be good.

d. Risks of serious software errors
Another already-discussed outcome of consensus-based development is the lack of robust testing before any software is released. Just because a code is discussed by many experts (or even tested in limited set-ups) before a release does not make it error-free. Most code developers do not have sufficient skin in the game before unleashing half-baked ideas into the real world. The book discusses a worrying number of badly written codes released in the wild in the name of "revolutionary" ideas, leading to an untold amount of losses for the believers. Like in diseases, it is almost inevitable that vulnerabilities in some codes are detected months or years later with far more significant damages than seen in early Ethereum or Blockchain Unlimited. The examples discussed in the book show how fragile the cryptospace is despite the reputation of being precisely the opposite.

e. Libertarianism does not come in one single form
As psephologists know from time immemorial, there is no universally acceptable voting mechanism. During the Blocksize war, the real wars were about who should have how much say in the decision and the minimum threshold before the decision is imposed on all. So far, the disputes have dissolved well, but with more fame, every cryptocoin is likely to face massive internal dissensions and divides.

f. 21m limit is valid only in the narrowest context
Bitcoin's constancy and stability are seen as features responsible for most of its value. However, dissenting voices will keep creating their own forks and coins forever - some with Bitcoin name as a part and some as entirely separate projects. Most crypto developers have strong personal incentives to create new coins with allocation for the self for quick riches as well. Some of these alternatives are bound to provide coins better than Bitcoin and cause the flippening that most ardent Bitcoiners deem impossible at present. Bitcoin money supply has no discipline or limit when one considers the constant creations of new coins with every dissent.

There are many other takeaways from the book. Some of the more significant ones are in the technological limits of Bitcoin construct and the role played by various players' personality traits in shaping Bitcoin evolution.

A must read.
141 reviews
February 17, 2024
What a great book. Every Bitcoiner should defiantly read this one. The author was directly involved in some of the discussions and therefor has a great account of what happened. Cant give this book enough praise.

"The contention was essentially about four somewhat interrelated issues; The level of block space available in each Bitcoin block; How to modify the rules of the Bitcoin protocol; The significance of the nodes of ordinary users; Time preference."

Santoshi - "When I designed Bitcoin, I designed it in such a way as to make future modifications to the consensus rules difficult without near unanimous agreement. Bitcoin was designed to be protected from the influence of charismatic leaders, even if their name is Gavin Andresen, Barak Obama, or Satoshi Nakamoto. Nearly everyone has to agree on a change, and they have to do it without being forced or pressured into doing it. By doing a fork in this way, these developers are violating the "original vison" they claim to honor."

"In addition to this, small blockers tended to consider full blocks as both necessary and inevitable in the long term anyway. It was necessary to prevent a fee market death spiral when the block subsidy was low. It was also necessary to ensure miners would move the chain forwards one the subsidy became low. It was considered vital to always have a surplus of transactions which didn't get in the blocks and were sitting there waiting to be included; that way, miners always had an incentive to build blocks."

"I began to realize that the rules of the network had to be robust. It does not matter who is trying to change the rules, or whether it is a good idea or not. If Bitcoin is going to succeed, it had to be really difficult to change the rules, otherwise it would not stand up to the pressures from the main financial establishment, which would emerge as the value of the system increased."

"SegWit is a way of increasing the Bitcoin blocksize, without the new client being incompatible (i.e. it was a softfork rather than a hardfork). A Bitcoin transaction consists of various components, one of which is the signature, authorizing the spend. This signature is typically the largest part of the transaction, based on the amount of data. SegWit was a new transaction format, where the signature would not need to be included in the old block, which still had a 1 MB limit.""Rather than stodgy, old top-down managed investment funds, the DAO would make investments as determined by votes from its users and would be governed by the code in the smart contract, rather than the law."

"Ultimately the rules of Bitcoin work because they are enforced by the users collectively -- that is what makes Bitcoin Bitcoin, it is what makes it something people can count on; the rules are not easy to just change."

"There are two groups of people which have two different visions for Bitcoin. None of these visions is "wrong". One group values more things like decentralization, lack of government, censorship, resistance, anonymity. This group things that Bitcoin will transform our world in 20-30 years. To reach this goal, it is of utter importance to stick to those values. The is no rush. The other group values more things like reaching one billion users in the next five years, or serving real unbanked users today, even if that requires a political agreement now. Both visions have their merits. But they are incompatible. Reply protection gives a chance to each of these 'bitcoiners' to full push their own vision. Both visions can co-exist today."

"Bitcoin Cash - The new difficultly adjustment algorithm (made it adjust more frequently) later proved to be fundamentally flawed, as it incentivized miners to leave the network and then return when the difficulty adjusted and profitability improved. The impact of this was that the capacity of the Bitcoin Cash network oscillated in a volatile way, which proved to be a major weakness and impacted the reliability of Bitcoin Cash as a payment network. It also caused blocks to be mined faster, which eventually resulted in Bitcoin Cash being around 10,000 blocks ahead of Bitcoin, with more block subsidy coins mined earlier."

"If one wants to change the protocol rules, one has to persuade and campaign for the support of end users and investors, who need to opt-in to the new rules. It was ordinary users who had the final decision-making power, and this was the financial sovereignty that made Bitcoin unique and compelling. Some people cannot fathom the idea of a system which has global consensus, but lacks as leader."
Profile Image for Divyanshu Bagga.
9 reviews19 followers
August 12, 2021
It’s hard for people to give up control over, what they deem, their creation when it grows beyond any individual or organization. That is what happened to the lead developer Gavin Andresen when he pushed for the change in block size limit, triggering what is now known as Blocksize wars. The significance of the war goes beyond deciding just the blocksize limit. It raised question about who controls Bitcoin, who decides what is good for Bitcoin, and how to rollout changes while making sure everyone in the ecosystem - the developers, node users, miners, exchanges, investor, etc are on board. When Bitcoin was a small experiment, it was easy for developer to decide what’s good and how to implement it. But without their realisation, Bitcoin grew beyond them, and the network no longer supported top to down changes introduced/supported by those who believed them to be in power - earliest developers, biggest miner, largest exchanges, early investors. Though these people had a lot of power, they found it impossible to ignore bottom level users and force their changes on the ecosystem. Bitcoin has proven itself resilient against takeover by powerful groups, and hopefully will remain so when it faces even more powerful enemies like central banks and governments.

That is my interpretation from reading this book. It reads like thriller, describing the war between large blockers, people who felt Bitcoin fees should be kept low while supporting high transaction throughput so it can be adopted by merchants as payment system. They viewed Bitcoin akin to startup where you need to move fast to capitalize on the advantages you have today. On other hand were small blockers, people who had a more longer term vision. They saw Bitcoin as a new monetary system, and for them it was alright to forgo short term advantage of being better payment system than VISA or Mastercard, if it leads to a more stable and resilient system which can stand against any adversary.
PS: even though I have a good grasp of how Bitcoin, Segwit, and Lightning works, a lot of technical comments went over my head. This book may not be the right for those who have just started going down the Bitcoin rabbit-hole.

Profile Image for Joshua Pujol.
10 reviews1 follower
October 29, 2021
What an absolutely fascinating deep dive into the history of the Bitcoin protocol. Specifically the all out war that took place between those who wanted to raise the blocksize limit of Bitcoin and those who wanted to keep it at 1mb per block. This book if anything opened my eyes into the true immutability and antifragility of the Bitcoin network. This book is a maturation of the ideas and purpose of the community whom are the true arbiters of the protocol.

It's such an important read to understand what the purpose of the network is. While many large blockers wanted to raise the blocksize limit in hopes to scale Bitcoin as a payment network, the small blockers fought back over several years of hard fork proposals such as SegWit, and Bitcoin classic. With Satoshi out of the picture prominent developers in the community shifted their eyes into scaling. But ultimately failed after many years of proposals to the community.

This book solidifies Bitcoins true nature of being a hard money, a fortress of immutability, a store of scarce value, a global base layer settlement. On the outside people can see Bitcoins measly 6 TPS as inferior to visa and MasterCard's exponentially higher throughput as a negative. But it is not the purpose of Bitcoin! Bitcoin is the slow armoured tank and visa is the quick but vulnerable motorcycle. Bitcoins purpose remains a layer one solution to combat our Keynesian cesspool of debt and manipulation by governments after leaving the gold standard. Bitcoin is and will forever be digital gold. A global settlement layer that no matter how hard anyone tries can never change or corrupt it. It's the base bone of an equal and fair world where the rules are set and cannot be changed. Bitcoin at its base layer will never and should never sacrifice decentralization to become another payment system. Bitcoin will be the backbone of the world's global financial systems and take us back to a time of hard money.
Profile Image for Jim Hohl.
21 reviews3 followers
January 30, 2022
An interesting story if you’re deep into Bitcoin.

For someone like me who’s only recently entered the Bitcoin universe and wasn’t aware of all of this unfolding in real time, this book helped put a lot of the pieces together (like what’s a fork and why does it matter, what’s Bitcoin cash and how is it different from Bitcoin, etc).

I think if this were the first book I read on Bitcoin I would have been utterly confused. But after reading a few others, the technical details in here (mostly) made sense to me. And I knew a lot of the main players’ names, which also made it fit together better.

The author did rely a bit on supposition, as it was admittedly compiled from memory after the fact, from the author’s firsthand experience. At many points he says things like “as I recall” or “it seemed to me” which don’t *seem to me* to be an accurate way of relating history. But I’ll grant him that maybe in real time it didn’t seem like it was something he needed to document since he was actively involved in it, and I imagine his recollection is mostly sound.

Regarding the audio version, Guy Swann does a good job. He hosts his own podcast where he basically reads articles from the space so this was in his wheelhouse. He has a voice that’s easy to listen to. However, I’d encourage him to avoid trying to do “accents” when narrating the writings or speeches of non-native speakers of English. He went right up to the edge of stereotype and, imho, crossed it a couple of times. Didn’t ruin the book for me but I’d rather he just stick to narrating in his own voice and not with phony accents.
Profile Image for Warren Mcpherson.
195 reviews29 followers
November 21, 2021
This is a great description of how the governance and technology of Bitcoin have developed in practice. Having watched the discussions at the time it was sort of fun to read about events from a "historical" perspective. The author ties several discussions together in a way that is quite insightful. There is also a strong analysis of the subtle influences that have shaped the tone of discussion. In this telling, the relations between different groups are dynamic and all parties have very understandable positions.
One observation was that early participants had very different rationals for participating. As the price went up they all felt validated in their contradictory perspectives. Each person was convinced they were a genius. Each person was confident they knew what was best. Near the end, there is again a separation between truth and validation drawn out in an insightful conclusion.
The participatory nature of open-source software in general and Bitcoin, in particular, open a field of digital citizenship. Many parties can play important and unique roles without a dominating force that one might expect. To understand this future, the lessons learned in the messy process of advancing the technology of bitcoin are important.

4 reviews
December 10, 2022
Essentially a detailed account on an important part of bitcoin's lore. Other technology is touched on but this is (as the title indicates) very centered around bitcoin and the crypto that forked from it. Was surprising to learn some of the threats and adversity bitcoin overcame and how the underdog minority of idealists narrowly won multiple crucial battles over the integrity of their technology.

The amount of documentation the author uncovered - including forum discussions, conference conversations, and mailing lists, among others, was impressive and backstopped the narrative with large amounts of historical context.

There was a hint of bias toward one of the sides in the titular war but both sides' rationales were explained and represented well. I came away from this book with a better understanding of the history of bitcoin and it's various factions, but the biggest takeaway was an increased appreciation for the immaculate inception and development of a once-in-a-lifetime piece of technology.

5 stars for anyone interested in the subject matter, less if not, though I imagine the story would be compelling for anyone with an interest in technology and/or engineering
63 reviews1 follower
September 7, 2022
If you have anything more than a passing interest in bitcoin you must read this book. This is the book I'll recommend first to anyone interested in reading a book on crypto.

It's an account of the dispute "war" within the bitcoin community that ultimately resulted in bitcoin splitting two in in 2017 with the creation of bitcoin cash.

This book does require some background understanding of cryptocurrency - as an enthusiast it's hard for me to guage what it'd be like to read this book without any knowledge of bitcoin. However, it's Safe to say that this book doesn't require any knowledge of coding or other technical or IT-specific skills (since I totally lack these anyway!)

The thing I loved most is that reading this book felt like reading a thriller - yet does not feel over dramatized. It does seem a little biased against the "big-blockers" but only in the sense of supporting the underdog "small-blockers" for the virtue of them being more populist, not because they are nobler or technically superior.

Profile Image for Dave.
457 reviews11 followers
November 19, 2023
A straightforward and direct tale of the small blockers vs. big blockers battle.

- The big blockers were better funded but had issues with the credibility of their leadership and the knowledge levels of their VCs

- When a new type of money gets invented it's inevitable others will think they can improve upon it, and thus the alt coin development was a rite of passage, and may have been in bitcoin's best interests as it took a number of questionable characters out of the space

- Not sure why lightning was not viewed as a solution by more of the big blockers

- The market voted with their wallets and bitcoin cash lost

- Leadership at many of the exchanges appeared willing to go whichever way the wind blew

- Ethereum redoing some of its chain after the DAO funds were stolden showed how very not decentralized the protocol is

- China's miners really did have a very high percentage of the hashrate for some time

- I don't know that this feels like David won a war with Goliath, but it does feel like David at the very least won a large battle
Profile Image for Carlos.
51 reviews8 followers
January 12, 2022
It's a really good book, summarizing the events which lead to the creation of Bitcoin Cash. When I started on Bitcoin the whole blocksize war was unfolding and I really didn't understand the events really well.

Also, it helps connect how other events, such as The DAO incident on Ethereum and the split after that helped gain perspective on how such a split would affect Bitcoin.

The most perplexing thing about this book is how it constructs the persona of the author, which I think is not really a person. He seems to be present in all major events of the drama, but the book doesn't really have any information about him, his background, occupation or anything at all. He doesn't really have online presence neither.
Profile Image for Álvaro (Alvy).
Author 1 book9 followers
September 1, 2021
Está bastante bien como relato de una época (2015-2018) donde se produjeron las «guerras por el tamaño de bloque» en Bitcoin. Retrata a personajes, egos, toca temas un poco técnicos (aunque no en profundidad) y revela mensajes, el contenido de reuniones y demás. La última parte es quizá demasiado liosa, pero el resto explica bien la problemática y cómo se desarrolló la lucha hasta ese momento. Está publicado a principios de 2021, pero no incluye gran cosa sobre los últimos años porque es un tema aparte y se concentra sobre todo en las guerras por el paso de los bloques de 1 MB a 2 MB, SegWit y derivados. También habla de muchas de las variantes de Bitcoin (Cash, Unlimited, 2X, SV…) y algo de Litecoin, Ethereum y otras.
Profile Image for Saint Erik.
23 reviews1 follower
April 9, 2021
What surprised me most about the war was how close the large blockers came to winning multiple times. I realize how much of the properties and value propositions of Bitcoin weren't always clearly defined. Core devs had to fight for these principles. This book does a good job of breaking down the previous softfork activation mechanisms that were used to trigger segwit, you can use this to understand why the current activation mechanisms exist and how they came to be. It makes understanding the how the upcoming Taproot updates will unfold clearer.
Profile Image for Tim.
130 reviews4 followers
December 4, 2021
Good book, not a great writer but brief enough and high level enough that the soap opera of the story could be followed. It surprised me how close the BTC protocol might have gone in another direction and although the author finishes by reminding one that something like this might happen in the future in a different way, not enough of a conclusion was included. Additionally thoughts and/or opinions on what improvements if any might have been brought to bear on the protocol to avoid this kind of situation in the future would have been nice.
Profile Image for Sumudu Perera.
122 reviews2 followers
December 27, 2021
Having seen this conflict between blocksize agreements firsthand only part way through the point in history, and being a mere bystander for the most part, this piece of pivotal Bitcoin history from first hand accounts is absolutely fascinating. A fascinating read, with big takeaways for the progression of blockchain technology presently and into the future.

These consensus mechanisms and our decentralised future may seem to be with the ‘power of the people’ but this can be easily corrupted by those with greater financial acumen, influence, or political sway. Further notes soon. 5/5
8 reviews
January 4, 2022
A great read.

In addition to offering a history of the block size debates, this book is also great for anyone wanting to get a better understanding of the economical and game theoretical aspects of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. It also offers insights on the questions around governance of cryptocurrencies and other decentralized projects.

The authors leanings towards the small block side do come through - as do, however, his ambitions to describe both sides in a fair and balanced way. His ambitions in this regard is reasonable successful as well, in my view.
Profile Image for Santiago Torres Moreno.
4 reviews2 followers
February 6, 2022
Awesome book that details the battle for control of bitcoin’s protocol rules. In hindsight I think is a must read for every bitcoiner, because it’s has great historical lessons, it narrates one of BTC’s most dangerous times (existential wise) and the importance of it’s immutability and resiliency over technical/scalability issues.

Although I recommend that before reading this book you should have strong technical fundamentals on BTC to enjoy it more and get a greater understanding, because many parts of the book focus on battle over technical issues (at least on the surface).
Profile Image for Armin.
214 reviews9 followers
May 21, 2023
The accounts detailed in this book are important to remember, and therefore it is invaluable that the author has compiled these in this book. When you look at Bitcoin in 2023, it looks like the dominant cryptocurrency that was uncontested. Similarly to the Cuban missile crisis, Bitcoin was at war and at the brink of potential catastrophic failures. I am glad that this book recounts who was on the wrong and on the right side of history in terms of people, developers, influencers, companies, and organizations. In the future, we know: the users decide in bitcoin.
297 reviews3 followers
July 21, 2023
I can see why this book sits high up in the Bitcoin canon. It's about much more than a dispute over how large bitcoin blocks should be, which turned out to be a heated, multiyear war with all kinds of twists and turns. But it's also about how things aren't always as they seem, about how people foolishly stake their reputations and credibility on the wrong things, and about the im... [see the rest on my book review site.]
Profile Image for Alex.
554 reviews39 followers
May 24, 2021
A fascinating and detailed account of some important events in the history of Bitcoin's development. While I was aware of some of these at the time they occurred, it certainly was not at the level of detail that Bier provides, and he has meticulously sourced many interesting historical tidbits here. Definitely inside baseball as far as the content goes, but for the right audience this is a fairly unique and invaluable record.
Profile Image for Nzcgzmt.
89 reviews6 followers
August 28, 2021
This is a fantastic chronicle of the blocksize war that led to the SegWit update in 2017. Bier is currently Head of Research at BitMex (which has a highly regarded research practice). He has a good grasp of the technical details behind blockchain and is able to summarize key contention points really well. Importantly, he has first hand knowledge of most of the events - which makes this book a very impressive piece of research.
Profile Image for Ryan Peyman.
4 reviews
October 24, 2021
Great read on Bitcoin’s block size war - read almost Ike a thriller that one is compelled to finish on a weekend. Recommend to anyone who follows this space closely. Only caveat is one should have a decent technical understanding of Bitcoin’s blockchain (don’t need to know what UTXOs are, but an understanding of block size and why it matters is helpful), since otherwise the nuances between the two sides in the “war” would likely go unappreciated (and make for a less interesting read)
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