Senator Ted Cruz, vocal Bitcoin supporter, tweeted a proposal to raise the Bitcoin block size to 17.76 megabytes — a figure he explained was symbolic of “fighting the tyranny of Joe Biden and the Democratic party.” The senator argued the current limit hinders Bitcoin’s ability to scale and to compete with other payment systems.

The community’s reception was mixed in the way a settled war is mixed. Critics noted that so large an increase would centralize the network by pricing individual users out of running full nodes. Pieter Wuille and Adam Back replied to the tweet explaining that this issue had been hashed out in 2017. Gavin Andreeson was quick to jump in and share his support for the increase.

The Bugle’s editorial verdict was generous: while the specific proposal “may not be ideal,” it had sparked an important conversation, and any block size decision “should be made through a collaborative and decentralized process.”

irl: Ted Cruz is a real Bitcoin-boosting Texas senator. The piece replays the 2015–2017 blocksize war: Pieter Wuille (Bitcoin Core developer) and Adam Back (Blockstream CEO) were real small-block figures, and Gavin Andresen (spelled “Andreeson” in the article) was the big-block advocate who backed the losing forks — his enthusiastic support here is the tell. 17.76 MB = 1776. “Texify” puns on Cruz’s Texas-secession-flavored politics; no such proposal ever existed.