Thank you btcusury, this was an very interesting read. It even made me consider to understand theymos' censorship and ascribe him some kind of heroism.
But yes, what you write is to some kind an eye-opener to understand the small block side.
On the other side you and Lauda seem to fail to understand the other side - the big blockers - and so you built a conspiracy theory about some takeover through "leaders" and "companies" manipulating the markets. The truth may be more simple:
the economy lost faith in core to solve the scalability problem.
Why? From a technical side, core presented a solution (SW) that may be better (I have doubt, but don't want to discuss). But bitcoin is not just technology, it's also economy and politic. It's nothing without exchanges and holders, and a consensus is nothing without a compromise. You seem to recognise this by acknowledging peter_r's grafic. But you don't acknowledge it enough to understand the other side. Maybe this is a result of engineering dominance in core and a lack of understanding of the need of economics and politics.
In the context of Bitcoin, "consensus" refers to "technical consensus" at the protocol level, not "economic consensus" at the user level or "political consensus" at opinion level, despite how much the latter two ideas/memes have been spread lately. Yes, it's permissionless, so you are free to create a hardforked chain bootstrapped off the Bitcoin blockchain, but don't pretend there is "consensus" if the "consensus" is only at a user (economic/political) level after (what at least appears to be) a relentless disinformation campaign to direct the technology into a particular untested/risky nonreversible territory.
Try to see it as you were coinbase. The scalability issue is well known for years. In the past it was always said the blocklimit will just be raised. Now we discuss raising it since 1,5 years, and nothing happened by now.
Coinbase is just a business trying to benefit from a particular technology, without much regard for the direction of the technology -- one that happens to contain unprecedented revolutionary potential, which we should do our (technical) best to preserve/develop. The question is, why are
you into Bitcoin? To make money? Or to help move us toward a fairer economic system free from central control and manipulation (debt-based fractional reserve fiat bankster "money")?
As a technologist you could say: yes, it was a coup de liberation, we have SW (there are reasons to discusss this, but here I don't mind). As a politician seeking consensus through compromise, you can only say, it's a disaster.
The premise of "a politician seeking consensus through compromise", and even the premise of a politician itself, is highly questionable, to say the least. Just as politicians (and their spokespeople, the mainstream media "news" outlets) manipulate minds by means of filtering out other information sources, thus exposing minds to particular agenda-driven ideas to the exclusion of more relevant/interesting/better ones, so any opposition group, be it a "radical" political party or grassroots organization or terrorist group or foreign "leader" of a country or (you can safely bet) a decentralized payment system, is targeted by means of getting people to promote disinformation as misinformation. So it's not that there would have to be many actual paid shills spreading disinformation (a major conspiracy, to use that term); the majority of them would be spreading misinformation after having been exposed to cleverly-crafted disinformation.
- the defenders of core's decision act "strange" (ddos, censorship)
Or, an impression has been created that they act strange. Discussion of DDoS comes from individuals, not Core devs, and you already got an answer to the moderation/censorship, no?
Do you really need a conspiracious takeover to understand why businesses support classic en mass?
No, but wouldn't it be the perfect opportunity for such a "takeover" to be executed? Like I
asked sgbett (to no response), "At what point, if at all, do you suppose an organized effort to protect the dying old comes into play?"
