Let's assume for a moment Bitcoin was a company.
We as a shareholder in this company are hereby voting to fire Theymos, distance ourselves from him and his hyprocrisy and remove all Blockstream employees from management and PR positions. No doubt the Core developers working for Blockstream are very valuable technnical experts in their domain, but not even in government someone as unpopular as them would be able to remain in their job.
We encourage all our customers to support a hard fork to 2 MB blocks.
We as a shareholder in this company are hereby voting to fire Theymos, distance ourselves from him and his hyprocrisy and remove all Blockstream employees from management and PR positions. No doubt the Core developers working for Blockstream are very valuable technnical experts in their domain, but not even in government someone as unpopular as them would be able to remain in their job.
We encourage all our customers to support a hard fork to 2 MB blocks.
We are asking all our customers to pull their support from the censored subreddit r/Bitcoin, from Theymos and from all Bitcoin Core developers, who work for Blockstream and do not support a block size increase. Statements like "We do not care if fees rise to $100" really fill us with bitterness and anger. In case of a hard fork we are more likely to support the network that has lower transaction costs as raising fees are endangering further adoption and growth of our platform.
I just want to say that I fully disagree with this:1) Theymos has nothing to do with Bitcoin Core. Equally Bitcoin Core has nothing to do with /r/bitcoin subreddit. Only very few of the Bitcoin Core developers are active on reddit. IMO you should separate those two things.
2) Bitcoin Core has more than 100+ contributors. Only very few Blockstream employees (like 4 or 5?) are working on Bitcoin Core too. Blockstream != Bitcoin Core.
3) If you want bigger blocks (me too!), you could start by showing your support for Segwit - which will give effectively 2x the blocksize (2MB indeed) in a very safe and properly tested way.
4) I fully agree with your statement about $100 fees. But it is important to realize that almost all Bitcoin Core developers do not want $100 fees either! Just because some extremists say this, doesn't mean that everyone in Bitcoin Core wants this.
5) Segwit is just a start. It give an initial minimal bump to make the fees a bit lower. Additionally and more importantly, it will help decentralized trustless second layers for real scaling like the Lightning Network (LN.) While I am skeptical about those second layers, it is interesting and could potentially be awesome. It is important to realize that it is decentralized protocol with different teams working on it: lightningd, lnd, Thunder, eclair, Amiko-pay. I am personally planning to test LN a bit with regtest and testnet to see IF and HOW gambling sites could potentially use LN in the future
6) After Segwit, I have no doubt more scaling improvements will follow. I am personally a big supporter of Bitcoin Core, but I definitely want to see a safely planned dynamic blocksize HF in the future too(!) 1MB Is definitely not enough in the future and a properly planned non-contentious HF should be possible IMO.
7) BU will cause a blockchain split and will be very bad IMO. I don't think miners should have the full power to change the blocksize limit to any limit they want. Effectively "emergent consensus" would give that power to 5 mining pool operators, while the costs of a blocksize increase is mostly upon the full node owners. IMO with the risks of "emergent consensus", gambling sites will have to change their required confirmations too. Most sites require now 1 confirmation (yourself included), but even a very small miner can fork off and trick you to get 1 confirmation if your BU node's EB setting is "wrong". Orphans are possible now, but 1 till 12 confirmation will be much less safe with the "emergent consensus" model. Not even talking about their incompetence, lack of testing / peer reviewing, etc. I understand you don't explicitly support BU, but just sharing my opinion.
Overall I think you are experiencing the bad things of the rising fee (which I understand), but your anger towards "Blockstream/Core/Theymos" (which are 3 different persons/groups) seems to be misplaced TBH. I personally fully agree with RHavar's statement today.
