Gavin keeps talking about the urgent need of a blocksize increase while just few hours ago we reached an all time high for transactions per day. A whooping 242129 transactions, in a single day! And the mempool is just 2,446.50 Kb big and instant confirmation fee is less than 50 Sat per Kb.
It is obvious that the disaster from overfilled blocks isn't true, and there is still enough capacity to process txs cheaply. The data is clear and undeniable regardless of how often the misleading statement that "blocks are full" is repeated.
Let me defend Gavin and Jeff for a moment to empathize and understand a big blockers mentality:
What they are concerned about is stunting potential growth in volume, especially in anticipation of a new bubble which is likely to happen this year, which will prompt many new users to adopt bitcoin. Another concern for them is the "Fidelity Problem" where certain institutions and business models simply won't
directly use bitcoin because it cannot handle the volume that is required. In their mind they would rather have an average of 5-10% full blocks to insure that in moments of spiked usage there is no backlog of tx's or fee market created.
These are valid concerns , but ones which are focused on short term growth at the expense of long term scalability in a secure and decentralized matter. The mentality that assumes that we can simply keep increasing the maxBlockSize to solve the problems and that pymt processors with their inadequate mempool security algos for 0 conf is the way forward really aren't understanding the big picture and limitations of the technology.
If Coinbase/Bitpay don't get on-board and quickly start to expedite the development of payment channels (whether Impiulse , LN , or others) they are going to be in a world of pain because Peter Todd is soliciting interest for someone to create a nice GUI for his double spend scripts. The fact that Classic supporters don't see this as a problem and believe that ignoring the implementation of payment channels (Segwit fixing Malleability is crucial to progress in this arena) is fine by delaying segwit in favor of a 2MB HF is dangerously irresponsible and ironically places their supporting payment processors in jeopardy of losing everything. If they want to keep spouting off nonsense about LN and conspiracy theories , than fine ... please fork LN or further develop Impulse (bitpay) right away because it isn't RBF that is at fault but in trusting 0conf in general without secured payment channels.