We can and should view the 'bloatchain' or 'gavincoin' hard fork effort as simply an attack.
An attack? To remove a constraint that was always meant to be temporary? That's an attack?
Did I stutter?
Lot's of things that were hypothesized such as pruning have yet to happen. Also it was very unclear who would be embracing the system and why in the early times. With six years of history and ecosystem evolution it is perfectly relevant to re-evaluate certain things. And, as always, it would be simplistic to assume that everyone who was involved were always fully transparent and accurate with their thoughts. Satoshi had to make the best use of the resources he found at his disposal, and he himself may not have had a God-like understanding of all of the factors anyway.
That still fails to explain why you think raising the limit is an attack.
And:
Bitcoin always has and always will mean different things to different people. I'm not joking when I say that I believe the hard-fork is a deliberate attack on the part of some people and a stepping-stone toward destroying Bitcoin by destroying fungibility (chiefly through {color}-listing.)
As you seem to be the only person in the thread who sees a connection between a higher block size and blacklisting coins, perhaps you could walk us down the logic path you took to reach that conclusion? Sounds like an attempt at scaremongering to me. Either that, or the anti-fork crowd are running out of legitimate arguments and are getting desperate.
I cannot take full credit for this. The basic idea came from Hearn back in the 2010 timeframe when he said something like 'mining will be economically viable only for large specialists and there is little difference between between confiscating bitcoin and keeping someone from spending it for 20 years.' This was back before we 'did' Libya and the example he used was Qaddafi IIRC. Subsequently he spoke with apparent embrace of color-listing at the 2013 SJ conference (which I witnessed) and provoked a quasi-secret discussion of it within the Bitcoin Foundation.
So, let's see if we can stay on the ball here:
- 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.
There are many reasons to favor destruction of Bitcoin in this manner or others. It is a 'disruptive' technology which threatens vested interests who are doing quite well with state sponsored fiat, thank you very much. And, to be honest, Bitcoin provides a means for bad people to do bad things so it is not irrational to be against it for some legitimate reasons (though I find it ignorant and short sighted.) Mostly, Bitcoin is in the sights of attackers so if/when it falls certain other 'alts' which are less susceptible to the same failure modes may end up winners. Probably there are some people who recognize the potential for Bitcoin to succumb in a manner I've described and see it as an opportunity for their own project.