Whilst debate raged throughout the Bitcoin community over whether the block size limit should be increased and how, Luke-jr for years stood out for arguing the exact opposite position. One megabyte blocks weren’t too small, he maintained even as SegWit’s block size increase gained broad support, they were too big. No increase, but a decrease was needed.Now, the Bitcoin Knots and Bitcoin Core developer is spearheading an attempt to make such a decrease happen, as a temporary measure. And if social media is any indication, the initiative is attracting more interest than many might have expected it would.“I don't know if the proposal will be adopted or not, but support has been growing due to the block size becoming more and more apparently a problem,” Luke-jr told Bitcoin Magazine.Block Size DecreaseOf course, the arguments for decreasing the block size limit are similar to the by now oft-repeated arguments against increasing the block size limit. In short, bigger blocks add to the cost of running a node (making it more expensive for users to enforce the protocol rules), could increase mining centralization (risking censorship resistance), and reduces fee pressure (translating into less hash power security).The most pressing problem of these, for Luke-jr, is the cost of running a full node. This is perhaps best exemplified by the time it takes to initially sync such a node. Getting up to speed with the rest of the network...
