One megabyte per block is about seven transactions a second for the whole planet. While only enthusiasts used bitcoin, that was enough. By 2015 the line at the gate was measured in hours.
In the summer of 2010 Satoshi put up a fence in his world and told nobody about it. A single line appeared in the program, under which a block, the batch of records the network accepts once every ten minutes, could not be larger than one megabyte. The fence was there to protect against spam, against some joker who might clog the small network with junk transactions. When someone on the forum asked whether the fence would become a problem, Satoshi replied that it could be moved back gradually once we got close to the limit. A few months later he disappeared, but the fence stayed, and for the next seven years the people who called themselves his followers tried to work out whether they were allowed to touch it.
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A One-Megabyte Fence — Nobody Owns Money | Mike Fluff
