Firstly I'd like to say that I appreciate someone from the anti-fork side presenting a reasoned case, so thank you. If the others had conducted themselves in this manner, perhaps I'd be more interested in listening to them.
Thanks for at least reading and considering it. I've outlined my concerns in some detail here and there, but it's exhasting. More fun to hurl invective sometimes, and depending on the audience, probably more effective as well.
Ultimately it sounds as though your concern is that increased adoption and scalability can't happen in any beneficial way unless a significant proportion of Bitcoin's users understand the inner workings and run full nodes. Sadly I have to say that, fork or otherwise, I don't think that's ever going to happen. Regardless of the block size, I suspect a majority will always prefer a lightweight client. While many of us are here because we're intrigued by the ideals of decentralisation, most of Bitcoin's potential future users may not be interested in that and will just want something that works and is easy to use. While it's clear many in this thread would say it's best not to entertain such a lack of understanding (and I'm one of those who generally tries to discourage the use of web wallets, so I do sympathise), the question you have to ask is to what extreme do you take it? If your chosen fork only has the technically-minded "power users" (for lack of a better phrase), then you're only going to be sending your transactions amongst yourselves. For an ecosystem to truly thrive, I'm afraid to say you'll need at least some "idiots" for the sake of network effects. It's a simple fact of life that not everyone will care enough to be fully educated about this stuff. This would bring me back to the point I made in the other "fork off" thread about elitism generally not being helpful to the survival of the currency.
I just see no 'sweet spot' where some realistic threshold of 'Joe Sixpack' users can use Bitcoin for every day stuff and yet the system remains small enough to be sufficiently decentralized and defensible from subversion. There is always going to be some point where there is exclusion.
Even back when I first started using the system I was so aware of the cost of doing transactions which remain forever the responsibility of infrastructure operators (including myself) to maintain that I moderated my usage out of consideration. I find it highly irritating that people demand this level of security for day-to-day purchases. Similarly, the argument that everyone somehow 'deserves' this level of security is absurd to me. I don't request nor desire Bitcoin level security for any but the most critical transactions that I do.
I am a huge fan of 'sidechains' which should be on the near horizon. Assuming they approximate the design goal, they offer all the advantages of both Bitcoin and alt coins. With a properly functioning 2-way peg, a 'sidecoin'
is for all intents and purposes a 'bitcoin'. A sidecoin user must induce a lock-up of BTC which minimizes the economic impact on Bitcoin (though if sidechains are successful which I find very possible they could increase demand for Bitcoin significantly.)
Sidechains offer a theoretical and solid scaling potential to Bitcoin that make sense to me. If people want to have a conversation about blocksize based on this solid scaling mechanism (or really any other one), I'm listening. As I've mentioned several times on this thread, the current 20MB idea looks a to me a lot like some combination of a poorly considered hale Mary and a desperate and deceptive propaganda campaign.
People knock sidechains because they are 'not as secure' as Bitcoin. That to me makes as much sense as knocking a bus shelter because it is not as secure as a nuclear bomb proof bunker. That is a GOOD thing! It simply does not need to be, and it just makes the bus shelter and expensive pain-in-the-ass to use. And anyway, a properly implemented sidechain should be very close to Bitcoin's level of security anyway. And it should help support Bitcoin in times of failure of mining support from simple economics to boot.
(FWIW, I have never had any interest in researching or obtaining alts. I love the fact that many of them are exploring interesting ideas and have nothing against them in principle, but I've not yet given up on Bitcoin as something with the potential to be the solid core of a workable autonomous and solid crypto-currency solution.)
The trade off will be, if we carry on without change and start to regularly hit the block size limit and unconfirmed transactions start to pile up, the users who don't feel as strongly about decentralisation will change to a system that confirms their transaction first. If we start haemorrhaging users, then the reputation of the network itself could suffer and the general opinion could propagate that Bitcoin is slow and doesn't scale well enough. If the only people left still transacting are the ones who weren't prepared to compromise because of concerns over centralisation, however justified they might seem, then things could get pretty bleak. To me, that's a more pressing concern than big business taking over and destroying fungibility.
Most of the pro-fork camp aren't oblivious to the fact that we'll be making compromises too. But scenarios about increased centralisation aren't enough to convince me that we shouldn't be raising this limit. And in the event of such fungibility scenarios becoming likely, I'm pretty sure we'd all be rallying to fight against it.
See, I'm visualizing sidechains as a (frankly, near perfect) solution to give the masses (and their network effect) all of the power of Bitcoin and much more while not damaging it with pointless bloat which reduces the pool of potential infrastructure support. I imagined some sort of a network of subordinate chains as a scaling mechanism very soon after I read the whitepaper and saw the scaling difficulties. This is why your otherwise logical conceptions of the realities of 'network effect' are not swaying me an why I and so many others are at loggerheads.
Alts are not 'subordinate' chains. They are entirely independent. They are competition, and that's fine and good, but I'd much rather see a solution which works in a symbiotic manner with Bitcoin. I see some real difficulties with the simplistic conception of support for stand-alone native Bitcoin as we move forward and feel that sidechains can not only resolve the 'scaling' issues, and not only provide vastly better access for the masses, but also provide a support backstop in times when miners cannot make a dime (other than by exploiting the userbase.)
