As I recall (and this may not be the whole of it), the &quot;tradeoff&quot; was that a larger block size would risk getting attention from China&#x27;s great firewall, effectively splitting the network and rendering Chinese users&#x27; funds effectively worthless.  And it turns out a set of Chinese users have a controlling interest in the network currently... so yes, its a political problem <i>par excellence</i>.<p>It occurs to me as I write that Ethereum may have similar problems down the line, when platform updates turn out to be direly needed, but would disrupt the operation of well-established and lucrative apps.