I agree with this, what I was trying to get at is the outcome of this proposal (miner voting +IBLT) essentially forces or at least encourages maximum blocksize over time. This is in the interest of users and why I like the proposal.
i get what you are saying but it assumes 2 things:
1. voting is good
2. IBLT is ready
i worry that voting can be gamed. you could argue that versioning is a form of voting i guess but it is different in that it is a commitment that only has to be done once by a miner to indicate the preference to double the block size acc to Gavin's proposal. all that then needs to be done is to flip the switch after 75% of the mining network is demonstrating the upversioned blocks.
i have hopes for IBLT as well but that seems like that will take a while and certainly not in time for what we need now.
Voting can best be gamed when the process is hidden behind closed side channels between pools, developers or anything else. The advantage of putting voting into the blockchain is it makes the process transparent and visible to individual miners, which makes it much less exposed to gaming as individual miners can see this and respond.
The POW process is Bitcoin's voting process. Yes users, merchants, etc. should have influence, and they do, they can choose to run which ever client they want that follows whatever rules they want. But that is the external world interacting with Bitcoin and deciding how they want to interact with Bitcoin.
Bitcoin as a self-contained system has only one voting mechanism, POW blocks. If anyone wants to vote within Bitcoin's self contained world, stand-up a miner and point it to the pool that best follows your preferences. In many ways this is better than representative democracy, you are much more likely to find a pool you agree with than a US D or R candidate you agree with.