Satoshi Nakamoto may have intentionally slowed Bitcoin adoption early on.

[Ethan_Crypto]

I read that in Bitcoin’s early codebase (specifically before version 0.3), Satoshi included a line that rejected any block larger than 1 MB, even before block size was an issue.

This seemingly arbitrary limit wasn’t added for technical reasons, it was likely a deliberate move to throttle growth, preventing spam and forcing slow, organic adoption. At the time, very few people used Bitcoin, so there was no practical need for such a limitation.

It’s as if Satoshi designed Bitcoin not just to work, but to grow slowly on purpose avoiding early stress from overuse and helping decentralization take root.

[Ambatman]

I read that in Bitcoin’s early codebase (specifically before version 0.3), Satoshi included a line that rejected any block larger than 1 MB, even before block size was an issue.

No, the limit was introduced in version 0.3 July 2010 not prior
Prior to version 0.3 there was no coded limit. Doesn't mean there was no constraint though.

This seemingly arbitrary limit wasn’t added for technical reasons, it was likely a deliberate move to throttle growth, preventing spam and forcing slow, organic adoption

Though he didn't explicitly state the reason but many believe it was to safeguard against spam
And ensure stability during its early growth phase.
This did help in reducing the risk of centralization by keeping the cost in running a full node low.

And he later added that it could be increased through  a softfork as the need arises
showing it was never meant to be permanent.

[mcdouglasx]

I suppose that from the very beginning, Satoshi knew that scalability could become an issue in the future. That's why he introduced the difficulty adjustment to ensure a constant mining rate, and perhaps he even established that rule limiting the block size to 1MB to keep the chain's weight under control down the line.

I'm not sure if it was necessarily to prevent spam, but I believe he understood that over time the chain could become too heavy, creating limitations for nodes with fewer resources.

[stwenhao]

Satoshi Nakamoto may have intentionally slowed Bitcoin adoption early on.

Yes, but probably not in a way you think. It was true, but related to mining:

We should have a gentleman's agreement to postpone the GPU arms race as long as we can for the good of the network.  It's much easer to get new users up to speed if they don't have to worry about GPU drivers and compatibility.  It's nice how anyone with just a CPU can compete fairly equally right now.

See? It was possible to generate more coins with GPUs, but he wanted to slow things down, because then, more CPU users could mine their coins directly. And you can also confirm it, if you compare "prenet" version, shared in 2008, with the first official one: it required 20-bit blocks for testnet, and 40-bit blocks for mainnet (which is why the Genesis Block has more than 40 leading zero bits), but he lowered that from 40-bit to 32-bit, just to make CPU mining easier.

And if you compare block times, you can also see some artifacts from prenet, because the time between blocks was more like 15 minutes, instead of 10 minutes.

Prior to version 0.3 there was no coded limit. Doesn't mean there was no constraint though.

There were other limits. P2P message size was limited to 32 MiB (and still is, by the way), even if you ignore database locks, and other limits like that.

And he later added that it could be increased through  a softfork as the need arises

At that time, people thought mainly about hard forks. When it comes to soft-forks, they were invented much later.

to keep the chain's weight under control down the line

There was no such thing as "block weight" before Segwit in 2017, it was only "block size".

[NotATether]

Satoshi Nakamoto may have intentionally slowed Bitcoin adoption early on.

Yes, but probably not in a way you think. It was true, but related to mining:

We should have a gentleman's agreement to postpone the GPU arms race as long as we can for the good of the network.  It's much easer to get new users up to speed if they don't have to worry about GPU drivers and compatibility.  It's nice how anyone with just a CPU can compete fairly equally right now.

See? It was possible to generate more coins with GPUs, but he wanted to slow things down, because then, more CPU users could mine their coins directly. And you can also confirm it, if you compare "prenet" version, shared in 2008, with the first official one: it required 20-bit blocks for testnet, and 40-bit blocks for mainnet (which is why the Genesis Block has more than 40 leading zero bits), but he lowered that from 40-bit to 32-bit, just to make CPU mining easier.

And if you compare block times, you can also see some artifacts from prenet, because the time between blocks was more like 15 minutes, instead of 10 minutes.

This is not really pertaining to bitcoin users though, more to bitcoin miners. And even though having lots of reliable miners is one of the prerequisites to supporting a lot of users, it seems that any sort of limit was going to be a powder keg in igniting debates between (then) bitcoin developers.

You have coins like Bitcoin SV with their 1 GB block size, for example.

There was no one parameter value that was gonna make people happy.

It can be argued that the developer contingent that built Lightning Network only received so much support because most of the L1 purists left the project over big blocks.

[HeRetiK]

I don't think the blocksize limitation was put in place to slow down adoption, however it is true that satoshi was advocating for a slow and sustainable growth in Bitcoin's early days:

Basically, bring it on.  Let's encourage Wikileaks to use Bitcoins and I'm willing to face any risk or fallout from that act.

No, don't "bring it on".

The project needs to grow gradually so the software can be strengthened along the way.

I make this appeal to WikiLeaks not to try to use Bitcoin.  Bitcoin is a small beta community in its infancy.  You would not stand to get more than pocket change, and the heat you would bring would likely destroy us at this stage.

Incidentally satoshi disappeared not long after, leaving this as his second-to-last post:

It would have been nice to get this attention in any other context.  WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet's nest, and the swarm is headed towards us.

[ABCbits]

And IIRC, satoshi added that limit without discussing it with Bitcoin community in advance.

Prior to version 0.3 there was no coded limit. Doesn't mean there was no constraint though.

There were other limits. P2P message size was limited to 32 MiB (and still is, by the way), even if you ignore database locks, and other limits like that.

The database lock effectively allowed block with size 750KB or less and it wasn't discovered/noticed until few years later.

[AndrewWeb]

I suppose that from the very beginning, Satoshi knew that scalability could become an issue in the future. That's why he introduced the difficulty adjustment to ensure a constant mining rate, and perhaps he even established that rule limiting the block size to 1MB to keep the chain's weight under control down the line.

I'm not sure if it was necessarily to prevent spam, but I believe he understood that over time the chain could become too heavy, creating limitations for nodes with fewer resources.

If you ask me he knew a little bit too much about the future of bitcoin.

[kotajikikox]

Though he didn't explicitly state the reason but many believe it was to safeguard against spam
And ensure stability during its early growth phase.
This did help in reducing the risk of centralization by keeping the cost in running a full node low.

And he later added that it could be increased through  a softfork as the need arises
showing it was never meant to be permanent.

Yet another WIN encounter for bitcoin and reason why Satoshi just created the greatest system in the crypto industry. He did not just want bitcoin to work. He wanted bitcoin to actually survive and last. Or at least that is what is implied. Unlike other projects, I think this is what is missing among those. Everyone wants quick growth that it is unstable and unsustainable. But bitcoin being made this way prevents that. I think that this aspect of tech and system is underrated when it comes to bitcoin, tbh.

[d5000]

There was a lot of discussion in 2017 about this topic during the blocksize war.

But just the post-2017 development shows us what could have happened if the 1MB limit was not in place, or if it was much more generous (say 50 MB or even 1 GB).

Let's take a look at BSV, the altcoin created by Craig Wright. BSV had phases with 50 to 110 million transactions per day, the average is about 1,5 million (Bitcoin has about 400k), see this source for example. The blocksize eventually reached 1 GB (albeit this was likely a stress test as it was mostly around 10-100 MB, and sometimes it's lower than Bitcoin's).

But was this "adoption"?

96 % of Bitcoin SV transactions come from a weather app

Here's an example: Weather SV. It inscribes each hour the climate values of thousands of stations around the globe. For almost nothing, as fees on BSV are negligible.

That's not adoption, that's spam. You can simply use OpenTimestamps for the same process to be able to verify the data and store the data in another P2P network if you want.

It's likely that with the 1MB block limitation missing, such apps would also have clogged the Bitcoin blockchain. Even worse, it's possible that this would have created outages if the nodes weren't able anymore to process all that data, taking into account that years ago, the average processing speed of consumer hardware was much lower.

[gmaxwell]

The whole story you're missing on BSV is that once the chain way beyond anyone's tolerance to sync anymore it was essentially controlled by a monopolist miner, Calvin Ayre the sponsor and co-conspirator of Wright,  and they used their control to force hard fork consensus rule changes onto the system like "asset recovery" -- basically allowing themselves the ability to steal any coin on the system whenever they want.

So like, sure spam bad or whatever.  But so what, who cares?  There is a *reason* the bloat is bad-- and that's because users autonomy to reject rule changes depends on the ability to run a full node being a practical choice.

It's also why I'm not particularly concerned about spam in bitcoin-- because it can't have that kind of outcome (unless, of course, the spam promoters convince bitcoiners to eliminate the resource constraints).

[d5000]

So like, sure spam bad or whatever.  But so what, who cares?  There is a *reason* the bloat is bad-- and that's because users autonomy to reject rule changes depends on the ability to run a full node being a practical choice.

It's also why I'm not particularly concerned about spam in bitcoin-- because it can't have that kind of outcome (unless, of course, the spam promoters convince bitcoiners to eliminate the resource constraints).

Yes, in reality my post went into a similar direction (not "spammers are bad" but "block size limits are effective against spam"), only perhaps it wasn't worded clearly enough ...

If a resource is basically free, like the block space in Bitcoin SV, then if there's an opportunity to exploit that to make money from it, it will probably happen. This BSV weather app for example charges a small fee to those wanting to add a weather station and store their data on the blockchain. It's hilarious that the model seems to be profitable even if such a "channel" only costs 3 AUD and "includes" about 200,000 transactions (a bit more than 8,000 days with hourly broadcasts).

And of course this has consequences for the power structure, weakening the power of normal users due to the high requirements for full nodes.

Of course some could now say "Spam happened on Bitcoin! See Ordinals and Runes!". Yes, they may have a point, but this spam is expensive for the creators due to the block size limits, i.e. it will only happen if there is really a big financial incentive for it. And unfortunately in this case we can't really do anything as long as it's possible to spam using fake public keys / scripts (to discuss this in depth there are better threads though). But the good thing is that the spam will always be limited to the extent where consumer hardware is still able to handle it and thus full nodes are still possible for potentially dozens to hundreds of million users in the world.

How many people are able to afford a BSV node instead? For rich people this isn't a problem but the possibility to run a Bitcoin full node reaches deep into the middle classes and if several users share a node, even into the lower classes of society.