Will be interesting if they and other crypto-friendly merchants start announcing support for litecoin or dash or zcash or something else with higher TX capacity. That could ignite some serious competition against bitcoin at last, and force the warring bitcoin factions to wizen up, lock themselves in a room with a good facilitator and a copy of Kevin Sande's The Peacemaker, and not come out until they unified around a plan to move bitcoin forward. As long as they keep shouting that the other side is the Great Satan, bitcoin is stuck in the mud. Not good in a rapidly developing, cutting edge environment like cryptocurrency.
Yes. This is the first tangible reaction against the BTC Congestion we are suffering through. We may be nearing Critical Mass in just how much of this we can take while the Core Developers and the Miners sit around and twiddle their thumbs.
Locking them up in a room (like they do with the Cardinals in Rome when picking a new Pope) may be the only way. Else BTC may lose out to competitors...
This is ridiculous. If you think that bitcoin core is "the master", then you already conceded that bitcoin is a totally centralized entity. If you think that there are bitcoin cardinals and a pope, then bitcoin is already dead. If you think that a few guys in a room are deciding on the fate of bitcoin, it is entirely over. Then bitcoin core is just the FED board and everyone seems to accept that.
The bitcoin software is open source, and just anyone can propose a change to it. This has BTW already been done, with BU. So bitcoin's community has the tool to push the can somewhat further down the road. If BU is not used, it is not Core's fault - and if you think it IS core's fault, then that means that you think that bitcoin IS centralized.
No, what is REALLY happening is the immutable consensus dynamics at work. There's simply no way to change bitcoin. You can nail some guys to the cross and blame them of all the sins of the world, but it is not their fault. In as much as they COULD do something, it means that they were in charge, and that bitcoin was centralized ; in as much as bitcoin is really decentralized, what they can do is IMMATERIAL.
Bitcoin is what it is, and it has a hard limit in it. This problem was there from the beginning, it is a design error, and immutability makes that it cannot be changed. So yes, bitcoin is running into one of its fundamental problems, and that was unavoidable. And there's nothing that can be done about it, because of its consensus mechanism. Period.
Now, why can it not be changed ? The immutability comes from the antagonist nature of many players, and the fact that they cannot collude. If ever they collude, it means that the system is, after all, centralized. The hard limit of the blocks was a technical matter that could have been changed LONG AGO, when no player had any incentive in opposing it. Consensus over technical improvements which do not alter economic relationships is possible to find. But now, this window of opportunity is closed, as the block size is now an economic parameter that determines the "fee market". It is now a scarcity parameter of the same quality as the total number of bitcoins emitted. Nobody would think that one can still change the 21 million of bitcoins to be emitted: that's part of the immutable consensus. In the same way, the block size limit is a scarcity parameter now. It will be protected by the immutability mechanism in the same way. Because there are sufficient antagonists that have their advantage with it.
The only way to "save bitcoin" is to centralize it. This can happen in two ways. "important people collude" and set up a kind of cartel, deciding about everything in the future (including the 21 million coins). Or, bitcoin's block chain becomes "vault gold" and a banking layer (say, LN / ETF / ...) takes over actual usage of bitcoin IOU.
