The standard argument I have heard from small-block supporters is that larger blocks lead to centralization, turning Bitcoin into “PayPal on-chain.” Even if we accept that premise for a moment (which is strongly disputed and addressed in Hijacking Bitcoin by Roger Ver), it still ignores a basic fact: most of the world doesn’t have PayPal.
Billions of people have little to no access to banking services at all. For them, “just use a bank” isn’t an option; fees are high, access is limited, and you’re expected to hand over half your life history just to open an account (apparently my mother’s maiden name is essential for processing payments).
So even if larger blocks increased centralization, the outcome would still be a net win for the majority of the global population. Cheap, on-chain transactions would allow people in developing countries to use Bitcoin for everyday payments instead of relying on expensive, exclusionary financial systems.
Bitcoin wasn’t created to be a settlement layer for people who already have Visa, PayPal, and five banking apps. It was meant to be peer-to-peer electronic cash. Optimizing it only for the already-banked defeats the purpose.
Big blocks aren’t about convenience for the West. They’re about access for everyone else.
The “Big Blocks = PayPal” Argument Misses the Point
byu/NebulaParticular7035 inbtc
Posted by NebulaParticular7035
4 Comments
100%!
The argument for “big blocks” sounds like a moral win for the unbanked, but it’s actually a technical trap. If we scale by simply making the blocks larger, the hardware requirements to run a node eventually grow beyond the reach of the average person.
When a citizen in a developing nation can no longer verify their own transactions and has to rely on a massive data center to tell them what they own, they aren’t “banked”—they’ve just traded a local bank for a digital one. True decentralization is the only thing that makes Bitcoin worth having in the first place; otherwise, we’ve just built a slower, less efficient version of PayPal.
While the “small block” path requires more patience, we’re seeing the payoff now. Layer 2 solutions like the Lightning Network (which recently hit record capacity) and stablecoin integrations are providing the cheap, instant rails people need without sacrificing the network’s censorship resistance.
Scaling on-chain is a linear solution to an exponential problem, you don’t secure the world’s money by making it too heavy for the world to carry.
LN centralized and custodialized way faster than big blocks ever could. They do not have an argument anymore. But they still pretend.
Why not have dynamic blocks? AND total privacy?