Nick Szabo: Rapid increase in bitcoin block size is a ‘Huge Security Risk’

Nick Szabo, a cryptographer and digital currency researcher, has said that a rapid increase in block size is "a huge security risk" and "a reckless act to be performing on a $4 billion system." Szabo, who many believe to be the real identity behind Satoshi Nakamoto, made his comments as a part of the recent debate going on over the bitcoin block size that has shaken the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

The bitcoin network is running out of spare capacity, which has created two increasingly divided camps with one favouring raising the limit and the other opposing it.

Pete Dushenski, an author at Qntra and Contravex, explained that the size of the city is the Blockchain and the height of its walls is the network's hashrate.

"As such, the larger the Blockchain, the more hashpower is required to maintain the same level of security," he said and added, "The biggest challenge ahead isn't "bringing Bitcoin to the people" or some such nonsense, it's in maintaining a sufficient number of nodes to relay and verify transactions. This is challenging issue that has yet to be fully addressed".

However, Szabo proposed the approach of Pieter Wuille, which suggests, "The growth rate of 17.7% growth per year is consistent with the average growth rate of bandwidth the last years, which seems to be the bottleneck."