Wiki / People / Peter Rizun

Peter Rizun

🎙 Bitcoin Takeover guest · 1 episode
From the Bitcoin Takeover Wiki · ✓ 9 sources · 7 podcast anchors · built 2026-11-13

Chief scientist at Bitcoin Unlimited and author of the 2015 paper arguing that a fee market exists without a block size limit.

◆ Takeover vieweditorial · opinion, labelled

The wiki's angle: Rizun gave the big-block side its economics. On S16 E30 he still defended Bitcoin Unlimited's design but conceded that a 2017 bug “killed Bitcoin Unlimited as a … viable implementation on BTC”.[6]

Contents

  1. The fee-market paper
  2. Bitcoin Unlimited
  3. Scale
  4. On Bitcoin Takeover
  5. References

The fee-market paper

Rizun's working paper of 4 August 2015 argues that, accounting for orphaning risk, a rational miner faces a “block space supply curve”, and that an unhealthy fee market in which miners produce arbitrarily large blocks “cannot exist since it requires communicating information at an arbitrarily fast rate”[1]. On S16 E30 Vlad relayed Paul Sztorc's view that the paper was wrong about orphan risk but right in its title[2]. Jonathan Bier said on S16 E60 that after seeing Rizun's presentation he asked to speak at the next Scaling Bitcoin conference in Hong Kong to refute it[3].

Bitcoin Unlimited

Introduced on S16 E30 as Chief Scientist at Bitcoin Unlimited[4], Rizun described XT and Classic as attempts to reach consensus, and Unlimited as a mechanism that let people run larger limits and show that miners had to raise the block size in sync[5]. Asked about weaknesses, he said “Bitcoin Unlimited had a bug and a bunch of nodes were taken down”, which he thinks took the momentum out of the movement in 2017[6].

Scale

Rizun told Vlad that what he liked about Dan Kaminsky's 2011 talk was that it set an upper limit on how far Bitcoin must scale, “around one gigabyte blocks”[7]. Fork Wars quotes him from the same episode on the 1 MB constant as a hard-coded limit that would be hard to remove[8].

On Bitcoin Takeover

Episodes with Peter Rizun as a guest, from the show's feed (bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/feed.xml).

References

  1. primaryPeter R. Rizun, “A Transaction Fee Market Exists Without a Block Size Limit”, working paper, 4 Aug 2015 [archived]
  2. episodeS16 E30: Paul Sztorc's question on the fee-market paper▶ listen at 2:03:39timestamp transcript-derived, pending a listen [archived]
  3. episodeS16 E60: Jonathan Bier on replying to Peter Rizun in Hong Kong▶ listen at 58:56timestamp transcript-derived, pending a listen [archived]
  4. episodeS16 E30: Peter Rizun on Scaling Bitcoin with Hardware — introduction▶ listen at 0:49timestamp transcript-derived, pending a listen [archived]
  5. episodeS16 E30: Peter Rizun on what Bitcoin Unlimited was trying to show▶ listen at 1:19:19timestamp transcript-derived, pending a listen [archived]
  6. episodeS16 E30: Peter Rizun on the Bitcoin Unlimited bug of 2017▶ listen at 2:29:46timestamp transcript-derived, pending a listen [archived]
  7. episodeS16 E30: Peter Rizun on gigabyte blocks as the upper target▶ listen at 11:32timestamp transcript-derived, pending a listen [archived]
  8. btkFork Wars: the block size war timeline (Bitcoin Takeover) [archived]
  9. episodeS16 E30: Peter Rizun on Scaling Bitcoin with Hardware [archived]

Related

Bitcoin Unlimited
A full-node client that let users and miners choose their own block size limit, governed by a voting federatio
Block size war
The 2015–2017 fight over Bitcoin's 1 MB limit that produced the first durable chain split.
Jonathan Bier
The man behind BitMEX Research and author of The Blocksize War (2021), the standard small-block-side history o
Bitcoin Cash
The big-block fork of 1 August 2017, Bitcoin's first durable chain split.
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