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Comment by timthelion | Hacker News Reader

"The pull request has 221 comments, most of which are arguing over the definition of 2MB blocks. "

For me, as a young adult, the most important part of growing up has been learning to not engage in bike shedding. It is hard not to bike shed. When design questions come up, and I see one thing as being WRONG, it is really hard not to become myopic about it. But this is a great example of how bike shedding can be harmful.

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It obviously depends on who you ask, this is an incredibly politicized issue, but core developers would argue blocksize is not bike shedding, but rather an important defense against centralization and censorship. I think the stat I heard is that at 1mb, and with some interesting distribution topology, the current speed of block propagation across the majority of the network is 250ms. So, this is obviously where things get tricky, one person’s bike shedding is another’s critical requirement.

And where did this 250ms come from? Seems arbitrary.

I believe it came from this talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSRoEeqYtJA

And I think this is what Greg's referring to:

http://bitcoinfibre.org/

So all scaling progress is stopped because of a youtube video? Yikes.

There should be a law of bike shedding, where you don't realize you're bike shedding because omg it's the most important thing in the world.

Remember at this time the block size has already been increased up to a maximum of 3.7mb physical blocks. This is a large part of why there's discussion about what 2X means-- as commonly people think that the bitcoin block size is only 1mb but it's a 1mb "weight".

The 2x project would have doubled this to a 2mb weight but a 7.4mb physical block theoretical max.

While your observation about bike shedding is a timeless one, what this tells us is how important it is to share a common goal. If you disagree what it is you want to accomplish, the discussions around the definitions and terms with which the project leader described the goal will be endless. Those discussions are not bike shedding, those are the basics of getting everyone involved on to the same page.

There is a test in the BTC1 repository to play with different blockchain scenarios here: https://github.com/btc1/bitcoin/blob/segwit2x/qa/rpc-tests/b...

The way I always understood bikeshedding is that people who fell behind on their ability to meaningfully contribute to the project try to stay relevant at picking a controversial topic that they can build a ground to stand on around. The alternative is to fall into irrelevancy and lose status.

>...bike shedding

For those unaware, like me, this refers to the Law of Triviality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

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