The two sides, then, were known as Big Blockers and Small Blockers, and they were split over a rather small technical decision: how many megabytes of data a BTC block should handle. Big Blockers wanted to increase the block size to accompany more transactions, lowering fees and making everyday payments more viable. Small Blockers were more conservative, both in the way their name suggests, as well as in not wanting to make irreversible changes to Bitcoin’s source code. Big blocks would enable more people to use bitcoin, increasing throughput, but would also require a protocol update known as a hard fork (an irreversible, and non-backwards compatible code split).
