You guys ruined it all. Bitcoin is now fucked and getting more fucked everyday. I think the end in near.
I can appreciate your sentiment... First of all, what we need right now as a community is unity.
Greg Maxwell is the author of the core scaling roadmap and also the
Blockstream CTO, and he is at the heart of this debate.
Greg has openly called for full blocks and a fee market (which we have
right now).
But there is a growing number of users and miners that do not
think his roadmap is a good one.
This is why 40% hashpower is signaling for Bitcoin Unlimited (despite the inferior code and team).
We have to scale, we have to scale soon, and this is becoming more apparent with every passing day.
Bitcoin's value comes at least in part from its utility for fast reliable transactions and low fees -- a utility
that is being undermined by the blocksize.
Because of this undermining, altcoins are now being used for
actual money transfer and this is contributing to the BTC cryptocap share being at an all time low.
The extreme small blockers that want Bitcoin to be a digital gold
without great utility make even less sense than Blockstream.
There will be no great value to Bitcoin without widespread use.
(Nor will there likely be a security model that is even viable for
that scenario)
Many of the supporters of core's roadmap seem to be most concerned with
centralization via node cost increases. They need to understand that
those cost increases are inevitable -- the best we can do is mitigate
them but even LN will require much bigger blocks... and by crippling
on chain scaling now, we are seriously eroding the Bitcoin first mover
advantage, adoption and network effect. For example, Fiverr
no longer accepts Bitcoin. How sad.
These core supporters also should understand that the more we try
to have small blocks and a small main chain, the more we'll have to
rely on third parties, which is just as dangerous a form of centralization
(if not more dangerous) than expensive-to-run nodes.
If you want Bitcoin to be BIG, there are going to have to be a lot
bigger blocks and a lot bigger nodes, even with Segwit, even with LN.
Blockstream wants to build a 2nd layer? That's fine, that's great.
BUT...
Please...
Let them do it fairly and with free market dynamics, not unfair advantage of influence over
the core repo and intentionally stunting growth on the first layer, which is exactly what they've been doing.