This remains in my opinion the most serious technical threat to Bitcoin in the medium and long term. As it stands, the main constraint on individuals being able to run their own nodes is the Internet connection bandwidth. As blocks remain under 1 megabyte, this should be generally manageable. A hard fork that increases the size of the block would cause a rise in the cost of running a node and lead to a reduction in the number of operational nodes. And just like with the previous threats, while this is certainly technically possible, it remains unlikely to materialize because the economic
...more
