bit-coin.co.uk — a record, not a rant
That's the first sentence of Satoshi Nakamoto's 2008 whitepaper. This page documents, with dates and sources, how a small number of people came to decide that block space had to stay artificially small — and what happened to Bitcoin's use as everyday cash once they got their way.
Written and hosted from a Bitcoin full node I run myself. ← back home · read the whitepaper
Hong Kong, 21 February 2016 — the Bitcoin Roundtable Consensus
After an 18-hour closed-door meeting at Hong Kong's Cyberport, mining companies representing roughly 80% of network hashpower and a group of Bitcoin Core developers — including Adam Back, signing on behalf of Blockstream — published a joint public statement.
Segregated Witness would ship within ~2 months. In exchange, Core developers committed to producing code for a hard fork raising the block size, to be recommended within 3 months of SegWit's release, targeting activation around July 2017.
SegWit shipped roughly on schedule. The block-size hard fork code did not arrive. Blockstream's Gregory Maxwell publicly rejected the agreement after it was signed. Bitmain's Jihan Wu later accused developers of having “unilaterally torn up” it.
Bitcoin Roundtable Consensus, 21 Feb 2016; contemporaneous reporting on the agreement's collapse.
four moments, in order
Version 0.9.0 shipped a new default: any non-payment data attached to a transaction was limited to 40 bytes, framed as an anti-spam measure. Services already using OP_RETURN for document timestamping and early asset protocols were broken outright.
Raised to 80 bytes in Core 0.11 (2015) after public pushback. The underlying question — who decides what's a legitimate use of the chain — resurfaced again in 2025.
Moderators of the largest Bitcoin discussion forum at the time carried out a mass wave of bans and removals targeting any mention of Bitcoin XT, a rival client proposing larger blocks. A user was banned for posting two comics. Another was banned for counting how many people had just been banned.
“...regrettably escalated to censorship.”
— a moderator's own public statement, preserved and widely quoted since.
See above. Adam Back signs for Blockstream. SegWit ships. The block-size increase does not.
A second, broader version of the same deal — backed by companies representing ~83% of hashpower — was called off with no explanation required and no consequence attached to any signatory. Blockstream's Samson Mow had publicly opposed it beforehand, stating a hard fork “is not needed now.”
the base layer today, sixteen years after the whitepaper
A system that can't clear a coffee purchase without a second-layer workaround, or without paying more in fees than the coffee cost, is not functioning as the whitepaper's first sentence describes. That's not an opinion about the future — it's what already happened, on the record, while the promised capacity increase never arrived.
public statements, unedited, linked to the primary source
More voices — Gregory Maxwell — to follow as verified on-camera clips are found. Send me links to any specific statements you want featured and I'll add them.