Why can #Bitcoin #blockspace be considered as a #commodity?   Understanding the implications of blockspace in Bitcoin is a crucial element to understand Bitcoin itself. Satoshi created Bitcoin in 2009 with a limited blockspace of 1 megabyte (MB). This choice was probably taken to prevent spam transactions and ensure the stability of the network during its early stages.   Such limit did not allow more than 2,000 to 3,000 transactions, depending on their size, per block. When Bitcoin was not known to many this limit was working well, but as its popularity started to grow, more transactions needed to be included in each block, driving transaction fees higher and creating network congestion.   Blockspace increasingly became a topic of debate within the Bitcoin community, where some argued that increasing the block size would allow more transactions per block, lowering fees and eliminating congestion.   But increasing the block size has significant implications for the #decentralization and #security of the network, considering the higher amount of MB that each block would weight on the #blockchain. Its consequences on the costs of the infrastructure would price out normal people from running #nodes and keep an entire version of the #ledger in their PCs, leaving the exclusivity to secure the network and validate blocks to small elites and corporations.   The #Blocksize #war of 2017 has occurred exactly for this reason, where some developers ultimately came to propose a #hard #fork of the Bitcoin blockchain to increase block size to 8 MB, without having much success.   Different upgrades made to the Bitcoin network such as #SegWit and #Taproot helped the Bitcoin network to improve transaction privacy, security and scalability without touching the initial block size limit hardcoded by Satoshi on the network.   If we think of Bitcoin as a global settlement network for billion $$ transactions, the #scarcity and #utility of block space as a commodity becomes quite clear. Just as #oil is used for #energy or #gold is used for jewelry and investment, blockspace is essential to inscribe valuable, immutable transactions in the blockchain.   Miners tend to prioritize transactions with higher fees, creating a market for blockspace where users compete to have their transactions included in the next block. Such fees represent the value that users pose on having their transactions confirmed quickly and securely on a censorship-resistant network.   Transaction fees can therefore be considered as the price for such a commodity, being captures by #miners for the work done in keeping the Bitcoin network secure.