Reddit discussion on increasing the bitcoin block size clarified why many are opposed to the bitcoin hard fork.

A poster asked Bitcoin Core developers to explain their vision on increasing the block size. The poster claimed to be “very strongly anti-Bitcoin Unlimited (BU) but mildly in favor of bigger bitcoin blocks. BU has been proposed as a solution to scaling the bitcoin network that will hard fork the bitcoin blockchain.“Please, educate me on your view as to if the max block size should ever change, if not why not, if yes how,” the poster asked.

Block Size Change Needed

In response, a luke-jr, a bitcoin core developer, recognized the need to eventually increase the bitcoin block size. He said people are not running nodes since the full node percentage is far below the safe 85%. “If you ask people why they don’t run a node, the reason is often tied to the block size,” luke-jr wrote.

In addition, miners are skipping the validation task due to the amount of time it now takes to verify large blocks, he added.

Core developers have conceded all possible compromises for increasing the block size, luke-jr noted. Even Segregated Witness (a solution to address the bitcoin network scalability challenge that has garnered support from many bitcoin users), is being proposed with a block size increase to as much as 3 MB, luke-jr noted.

Urgency Not Needed

Luke-jr does not think an increase in the block size is needed at the present time. A 1 MB block size is sufficient for the near term. When that size no longer suffices, the Lightning protocol (a system that allows faster transactions by doing them off of the network chain) will likely be in production, improving blockchain efficiency. It could reduce 1 MB block usage to around 10,000.

Luke-jr conceded that a block size increase will eventually be needed, but this is several years if not decades away. The scalability problems could resolve themselves by that time.

The decision to support a hard fork, for its part, is one that the community makes, luke-jr noted