The BTC Scaling Debate It's become sort of a holy war between parties who disagree over the technical means by which bitcoin should be scaled to enable a larger transaction volume, and how quickly that scaling should occur. Both sides claim the other is operating in bad faith. As near as I can tell, the true origins of the difference have more to do with different conceptions of what bitcoin is and should be, and different tolerances for various risks to bitcoin. The "big blockist" side prioritizes transaction volume and the need to avoid full blocks, which could cause transaction slowdowns (or at the very least, higher fees). They envision bitcoin as a global payment system directly used in even very small transactions in high volumes. They think the risk to decentralization from increasing the blocksize is overblown or nonexistent. They generally think hard forks of both the bitcoin code and blockchain should require less community consensus than the "small blockists" do. The "small blockist" side prioritizes mining/node decentralization and a need to establish a functioning fee market before bitcoin grows much further. They envision bitcoin as a settlement layer or digital gold used only for transactions that require the security provided by the bitcoin consensus, with smaller transactions being done by faster sidechains. They think the risk posed by full blocks before a scaling solution is implemented is overblown or nonexistent. They think significant changes to the underlying bitcoin layer should require a higher level of consensus than the "big blockists" do. Now, both sides will argue like hell against those aspects of those characterizations, and in truth the arguments ARE more complex. Those are just crude sketches of the two positions. In addition to that, there are all kinds of personality clashes, lousy behavior, significant arguments over governance of Bitcoin Core, significant arguments over the wisdom of attempting to hard fork the blockchain without developer consensus, and people (mainly non-technical) who support one side or another just because they think it will lead to an increased price of bitcoin, because it helps their business, or because they are wrapped up in one or another bitcoin personality cult. I think most of the stuff in this category is a distraction from the real technical arguments, although the debates over governance, hard forks, censorship etc. are important -- they just aren't the core of the disagreement even though they tend to lead to the most anger and noise. All of the proposed solutions to scaling change the incentive structure for at least some parties in the bitcoin ecosystem, and can be seen as fundamental economic changes to bitcoin. Doing nothing would also lead to such changes due to the blocksize cap being hit. So bitcoin is changing as a result of the outcome of this debate, and different parties have different ideas of what that change should look like. Another subtlety often lost in the heat of the debate is that most technical "small blockists" do in fact support some form of eventual increase in the blocksize, and most technical "big blockists" do in fact recognize an eventual technical need for sidechains such as the Lightning Network. -- /u/phaethon0