Would Satoshi support current bitcoin?

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Would Satoshi support current bitcoin?

I’m making this post because of the new emails that came out. Posting this on this subreddit to get a less biased opinion since it‘s a bit of a touchy subject in bitcoin cirlces.

2016 the block size wars took place. I‘ve read many times that Satoshi wanted to increase the block size anyway and that bitcoin cash is the actual way Satoshi envisioned bitcoin to be like. I never really took the time to read Satoshis words in the bitcoin forums or other sources. Bitcoin cash proponents also seem super pissed and angry in every discussion which makes every argument evaporate for me.

Those new Satoshi emails really make it seem like he would prefere bitcoin cash over bitcoin if you‘d ask him today though. I‘m very curious if he‘d switch sides or stay with the non-hardforked version we have today. The email that stuck with me the most is the one containing this text:

If it did grow to consume significant energy, I think it would still be less wasteful than the labour and resource intensive conventional banking activity it would replace. The cost would be an order of magnitude less than the billions in banking fees that pay for all those brick and mortar buildings, skyscrapers and junk mail credit card offers.

It does sound like he imagined bitcoins being transacted on the base layer only. Current non-hardforked version of bitcoin would still partly need those brick and mortar buildings, etc. since the layers on top need to be handled and there’s no clear cut solution compared to just using base layer.

Also this one:

To think about what a really huge transaction load would look like, I look at the existing credit card network. I found some more estimates about how many transactions are online purchases. It's about 15 million tx per day for the entire e-commerce load of the Internet worldwide. At 1KB per transaction, that would be 15GB of bandwidth for each block generating node per day, or about two DVD movies worth. Seems do-able even with today's technology.

No concerns about increased blocksize having an imapct on decentralization because of propagation time leading to increased forking probability or the blockchain growing too fast.

I don‘t own any bitcoin cash, only bitcoin. But I‘m curious what others think about this. Of course he wrote those things very early on. Could be that there were certain variables he guesstimated or didn‘t use in his assumptions. Or he did see the full picture and still thought increased block size / tx on base layer is the way to go.

submitted by /u/aemmeroli
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