Main Page

About the Bitcoin Debates wiki
This site is an attempt to create a collection of the strongest arguments in various debates in the Bitcoin community, along with links to help readers explore the arguments and supporting data in more depth.

My goal is for people who subscribe to these arguments to think that the strongest versions of their arguments are captured here without any misrepresentation. If you think I'm not representing an argument accurately, am not describing it fully enough, or am missing some important argument, feel free to directly make edits to the wiki, or email me a description of the change you'd like to see.

Fundamental concepts
There are a few concepts which are critical to understanding debates within Bitcoin, but are often not well understood.


 * Decentralization is the most important property of Bitcoin
 * ...but despite that, decentralization should sometimes be traded off for other things
 * Power ultimately rests with users

Bitcoin block size debate
The block size debate is about whether to increase the maximum size of a block in the short term, and if so how much to increase the size and what (if any) automatic increases should be included in the change.


 * Arguments for large blocks
 * Arguments against large blocks
 * Specific block size proposals

People involved in the block size debates will often accuse each other of having a conflict of interest.


 * Some notes on conflicts of interest

Bitcoin governance debate
The Bitcoin governance debate is about how changes to Bitcoin should occur.

One side argues that it's natural and healthy for developers to propose and advocate for hard forks that would split the block chain, then let a consensus emerge as members of the Bitcoin community choose which side of the fork to follow.

The other side argues that hard forks should only be done when there is near unanimous consensus about the desirability of the hard fork.


 * Arguments for controversial forks
 * Arguments against controversial forks

Other material
Tentative thoughts on how to debate productively.