No one cares about an altcoin boasting 5x Bitcoin's capacity...because it's not Bitcoin. But if it boasts 100x Bitcoin's capacity, that's a game-changer. We have to at least get in the ballpark. Watching from the sidelines is not going to cut it, and I refuse to call that in any way conservative, patient, or careful.
There is no such things like Bitcoin with 100x capacity. The security trade-off is disproportionate with the incremental amount of txs you can process.
To get in the ballpark where some people here would wanna go you'd need 100000X anyway.
I also happen to think it would be a mistake, from where you sit, to pretend that people involved are "watching from the sidelines".
This post was strangely out of character for you I should say. To read references to alt-coins competition from you was a surprise! It seems more than most here you have championed the importance of the economic majority and its interest in respecting the ledger. Well unless you refer to the "spin-offs" idea, it seems out of question for me that the ledger would ever move to another chain that is not secured by the longest proof-of-work.
Spinoffs work as an altcoin defence provided we're talking about Bitcoin vs. altcoins
in the context of the Bitcoin community. But as long as you have a gigantic mass market still largely unfamiliar with Bitcoin, an "altcoin" (not an altcoin from their perspective, which is the key point) can take over if it can pull off the miracle of dramatically outpacing Bitcoin's adoption rate.
For elaboration of this aspect of the argument, see:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.11423570https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.11423612https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.11423877https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.11423961 (best summary here)
That miracle becomes a lot easier if Bitcoin gets artificially hobbled way below its potential. Now the question of whether we could have 100MB blocks now without wrecking decentralization, and are leaving all that extra capacity on the table for "Supercoin" to come and grab, remains up in the air. Surely intelligent people can disagree on where exactly the real capacity limit lies, and probably by orders of magnitude at that, considering all the optimizations we have yet to think of and all the new brainpower that the next wave of exponential growth will bring in.
The correction I'd like to make is to the idea that we can afford to keep Bitcoin potentially one or more orders of magnitude below its capacity under the assumption that we have all the time in the world to succeed. If you believe we are
definitely very near the real practical limit, then this argument wouldn't apply. But how many people in the smaller blocks camp are so sure of that? A lot of the Core devs seem to simply be concerned about what they would admit are theoretical issues, with the stance, "Why take unnecessary risks?" My point here is that some risk
is necessary.