Segregated witnesses will take a significant amount of time to implement, it will take at least two years before we could even expect this to be implemented throughout the entire ecosystem, which is what would be required in order to bring about this increase.
Another load of FUD further demonstrating your ignorance of technical aspects and your over-reliance on outsider for insight. You're obviously basing these numbers on Jeff's openly pessimistic outlook which is being challenged by a considerable amount of devs.
The more generally accepted view is that the softwork will take anywhere between 3-6 months. Once activated it provides an immediate 75% increase in transaction capacity.
Moreover Jeff presents a shoddy parallel between multi-sig prevalence and potential future pace of SW adoption by the ecosystem. There are many reasons why this comparison is not particularly accurate but the more important one is that the largest actors in the ecosystem (hosted wallets) who are responsible for a important fraction of current transaction load will have clear economic incentive to move forward ASAP with SW. This will immediately translate into even more headroom for regular transactions.
Regardless it is still not sufficient enough of an increase to avoid the network becoming congested and causing transactions to become more expensive and unreliable, effectively bringing about a change in the economic policy of Bitcoin, which represents a departure from the original vision of Satoshi.
Furthermore hard forks should be preferred because they act as an important governance mechanism which allows people to protest by not updating their clients thereby splitting the network, this is why I believe Core is so afraid of doing hard forks, this should be embraced as a feature instead of being considered as a flaw within the protocol to be avoided.
Hard forks create a dangerous precedent and potential destruction of the trust that has so far gravitated around Bitcoin since its inception, especially when there is a clear divide and lack of consensus.
The ability for us to compromise using a softfork is a clear win and anyone who does not understand this needs to double check their assumptions.
I think that hard forks are critical in regards to ensuring the freedom of the Bitcoin protocol by acting as an important governance mechanism, it is this mechanism which ultimately ensures the freedom of choice by the participants of the network. You think that hard forks are dangerous and will destroy trust, this trust of yours I think is misplaced, I would not trust a protocol that would not be able to hard fork, when there is such disagreement. Since hard forking in this way is the only way to resolve such a disagreement without tyranny of the majority. Maybe we should just agree to disagree on this point, unless you are unable to be tolerant of other peoples believes. Tolerance is critical however if we wish to live in a peaceful society, respecting that other people have the freedom of choice to do something that you might disagree with.
Instead of trusting any singular organization, we should distribute this power across multiple implementations, this is how mining and nodes are decentralized after all. The same principle should apply to development. So far we have three alternative implementations that support an increased blocksize. Bitcoin Unlimited and XT are both forks of Core so they will continue to take advantage of all of the developments and advances within Core. Btcd has been written from scratch on the other hand, a completely unique implementation, which will also make the network more robust and resilient, since not having a monoculture of implementations would make the Bitcoin protocol more healthy over the long run.
Different implementations are generally helpful except when they challenge the existing consensus rules. I don't see why you even adressed this point since clearly no one is challenging it.
Alternative implementations are important exactly because they can challenge the existing consensus rules, otherwise the consensus rules would be whatever the reference implementation says it is, that would be pointless considering that alternative implementations are important exactly for this reason that they can challenge the status quo.
Are you seriously proposing that users run code that is demonstrably lacking in peer-review?
Considering that these alternative implementations are mostly based on Core with only some small changes which have been reviewed thoroughly, I would suggest that users run this code. It is not true that this code is lacking in peer review unless you would argue that Core is lacking is well, which it can indeed be argued that they should slow down introducing more complexity into Bitcoin without reviewing these changes for several years first. The blocksize increase on the other hand is a relatively simple change which has been discussed for years now and initially was only meant to be a temporary anti spam limit, at much lower network throughput compared to today. Its consequences and related game theory are as dependent on economics, psychology and politics when compared to computer science.
I think we should let this experiment run its course as it was always intended, since I do still believe in it, even though others might try and convince you that it is broken and that they need to fix it with their solutions.
I am starting to think that this is the best solution, there are irronconcielable ideological differences here, that seem irresolvable otherwise, at least this way we will all still have the Bitcoin we want. I also think that this bests reflects the ethos of freedom and decentralization within Bitcoin.
We've been telling you forever to fork off. You dissenters are a minority and nothing else.
If you're not happy with the current development then move forward with your implementations and leave us the fuck alone.
If your code stands up to its own merits it will gain adoption but don't expect us Bitcoiners to be steered in by your political propaganda. No amount of bullshit is going to cover up for your technical ineptitudes.
I am starting to think that you are in the minority now, however this is difficult to measure or know, since we do not have any reliable metrics, and the forums tend to be disproportionately represented by people like us, the writers. Which is why proof of work as a consensus mechanism during a hard fork is really so wonderful. We will get to see what people really think when the market talks to us then. I look forward to that time when the pedal goes to the metal and people will put their money where their mouths are. We will see what happens, either way I am confident the fork to increase the blocksize will happen soon, I will be happy regardless of the support that it gains, since it will represent the freedom of choice, and that Bitcoin is truly free, governed by the economic self-interest of the masses.
