- As the transaction rate increases, fewer and fewer people are 'peers' (any more than a debit-card user is a 'peer' in the SWIFT system when they get cash from a machine.) The more they throw up their hands and just use Multibit or Blockchain.info, the less they know or care about 'P2P' and decentralization.
- Separately, on a sufficiently large timeline (months to years) nobody can mine in the black unless they can subsidize their income by monetizing alternate revenue streams. Mostly user intelligence data would be my guess. This could be for their own use if they are giants, or more likely, by selling data to giants. This promotes the 'specialization' that Mike eludes to since it is only realistic with high-value deployments. (When you start to see 'cash back for using bitcoin' that is one gift horse you probably should inspect the mouth of...and it would not be a bad idea now given the subsidies that users are currently receiving.)
- The more trinket-buying which is possible by the sheep using Multibit, the more corporate entities like TigerDirect will jump on board.
- Corporate entities and large mining deployments when faced with punitive actions for not following regulations will have no realistic options but to tow the line. If the law says 'comply with Bitcoin Licence requirements', that's what they'll do (though retailer types could just bow out at that point.) It would be a logical system design for a small number of specialist outfits such as 'CoinValidation' to operate registry and validation (color-listing) services so their customers (miners and retailers) can just plug in to their API. With a charter from state, business will be forced to their door. That seals the loss of fungibility I mentioned.
I suspect the people who really understand the ecosystem on a wholistic level will have a higher percentage of these unusual types, and in distributed-crypto-currency-land an unusual individual may have an even greater value ratio. Thus, I don't really care all that much about the numbers of foot soldiers in a boots-on-the-ground numeric.
Indeed, the idiots in the Bitcoin ecosystem today are numerous and they are much more of a liability than they are an asset. Their job is done. Disposing of them (as native Bitcoin core users) is yet another reason to look forward to a fork war.
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.
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.
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.
