many interesting quotes and thought about theymos and the censorship and about the risks of a hard fork.
But also:
Yes, I think the urgency pushed by larger block proponets plays into a power grab. Right now they are fighting against Core's roadmap that is sufficient to take the pressure off; it also lays the groundwork to solve the rest of the problem in successive stages.
When dealing with urgent emergencies, one must keep in mind the USA PATRIOT Act, the Reichstag Fire Decree, and Problem-Reaction-Solution in general.
In other words, they want us to hand Bitcoin over to them.
They don't need so much code, they just change blocksize with an xt-like voting to 2MB. And as long as they have the support of major miners they will succeed with it.
if this forces Code to bump to 2 MB it would also be ok. Some people of team big block think we should get rid of core. I don't think so, I believe them to be of a great value for Bitcoin.
If it is easy to code it what are they waiting for then? This is why it is suspicious for me. I could edit the code to 2 MB myself without knowledge of the required languages.
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.
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.
The economy was very patient with core. They never wanted to overthrow them. Economic acteurs usually don't want to make politics, they just want the politics to create and sustain a stable and predictable context. As Jeff Garzik explained, Core's refusal to act is equal to setting this context on risk. Blocks are getting full, we near a point where capacity limit is reached and further growth will be prevented. In business, you usually solve capacity problems long before they get real.
But still no company supportet xt, they all waited for core to act. They didn't want their business environment be damaged by a contentious hardfork.
All hope was that the second scaling conference would be a coup de liberation.
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.
Why? Because the roadmap explicitely says: "No blocksize increase at least for 2016." After all the discussion, core can't even comprimise to say: "Ok, we confess to a blocksize increase as soon as possible, but please let us first implement iblt and thin blocks and solve the problem with 2MB-transactions."
? There is zero compromise in matter of blocksize. Zero.
More reasons for the economy to loose faith in core:
- luke-jr prefers to lower the blocklimit
- peter todd doublespending coinbase
- core implementing rbf against massive complaint of the community (even with opt-in there are significant problems for not-updated wallet which I don't want to explain here)
- core wants a fee markets to raise = technicians deciding about politics which exceeds their competence and happens with a complete lack of rulesets for the decision = no predictability, no stability
- core denies to some part that there even is a problem with reaching capacity limit ("it's just spam" / "so fees have to raise"), while such an event will significantly limit the growth of nearly all bitcoin companies and make it impossible for many to even get ever profitable
- core defines to some part "legit" and "spammy" transactions thus overstretching their competence
- the defenders of core's decision act "strange" (ddos, censorship)
Do you really need a conspiracious takeover to understand why businesses support classic en mass?
