[vgb2k11]

But its still the wrong explanation. Think about it:

(i) Miners, not average users, hold the voting power.

(ii) When the 1 MB block-size is congested (like it is now), miners make significantly more money on transaction fee's.

(iii) Increasing the block-size increases supply and reduces demand for priority processing in the block, hence, reduces transaction fee's.

Which explanation truly matches your view of reality here. People (miners) are motivated by "A shared vision" or a dollar in the bank account? Look at it closer (quote from parent comment):

>

> "larger blocks means more resources required to transmit, validate and store blocks and if you cannot validate blocks, then you are trusting transaction validators (miners)"

>

Can you see the problem with the explanation now? Its written from the view of an end user (of bitcoin), not a miner. But its miners who vote on the fork, hence, the above quoted text is mostly irrelevant to understanding the "WHY" of the fork battle.

[jgord]

Its a transient equilibrium during growth, not a zero-sum game. We could see lower fees and miners earning more :

Hypothetically, if blocksize went up tomorrow by 8x, then potentially fees might drop by 4x and volume of transactions go up by 8x .. then miners will be making 2x in fees per block, for maybe 2% extra cost.

That has other flow on effects - if fees are lower bitcoin can accommodate people using it as a day to day currency, then its utility and user base goes up, then the valuation in USD goes up, the value of the bitcoins miners earn/save goes up, etc.

I think there are miners who understand that there is a sweet spot of fees being low enough to facilitate higher daily usage and growth. Also, the majority of their current income is not in fees, but rather in 'coinbase', the reward for mining the block [ which is how new bitcoin money supply is injected into the system ]. They are highly vested in the valuation of USD/BTC, so they will do well if the user base of bitcoin grows.

[Frogolocalypse]

None of the nodes users, which define and police consensus in bitcoin, is interested in reducing the security of the network to allow miners more control. This is the fourth failed coup attempt of the bitcoin network, and the only thing that it has demonstrated, is the resilience of the network against large corporate centralization attempts. Segwit might very well be the last architectural change of the protocol.

[hn_throwaway_99]

But miners aren't stupid, and they know that if they are perceived as being a huge bottleneck and impediment to the growth and viability of Bitcoin, everyone else will just follow a different chain.

Currencies only have value if people are willing to trade you actual goods/services for it, and if the larger community decides the value lies with another fork, miners will lose all their power.

[kalleboo]

> (ii) When the 1 MB block-size is congested (like it is now), miners make significantly more money on transaction fee's.

One thing I've not understood is, if the miners want more money from fees, why don't they just say "we're not accepting into blocks any transactions with fees lower than X"?

If just one large miner with 10% of the hashrate does this, that instantly puts any transaction with a lower fee than that at a 10% chance of being delayed, and if the fee is still reasonable people will pay it just in case.

And it's not like there's a market of miners. A user can't refuse to deal with a miner or choose who gets to confirm their transaction.

[manquer]

This is how priority transactions work.Increasing block size would allow more transactions per second. Less people would then pay for the premium of fast transactions as the normal transaction is fast enough

[ithought]

Can you elaborate further?

When Mike Hearn quit bitcoin (Jan 2016), he wrote the Chinese miners were worried about bitcoin getting too popular because of their limited access to the Internet. And said they were actively trying to supress its popularity. But obviously that isn't true now?

https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experi...

[vgb2k11]

Check out replies by zkSNARK and stale2002 (just down-page at time of writing). Screen cap here for reference: http://imgur.com/a/xBJUW