Segwit transactions are not "the same set of transactions" as non-Segwit transactions.
Let's back up the bus a sec. Seems we have a terminology overload. When I said "the same set of transactions", I'm speaking of economic transactions, not their encoding upon the wire.
Cheese? Who's in the Free Shit ArmyTM now?
What are you babbling about? I'm contributing all the bandwidth I can
Want some cheese to go with that whine?
If you're contributing all the bandwidth you can, you're gonna be kicked out of the club of contributing nodes as soon as SegWit activates.
Gee, thanks Core!Incidentally, I operate a fully-validating node as well. Several, in fact. So sorry you live in a backwater. Must be analogous to trying to mine in Sweden, rather than China.
Big blockers suggest that we increase capacity simply to keep transactions cheap or free for users.
Perhaps some. Not the ones I speak with. We suggest we increase capacity in order to increase capacity. Making room for more transactions. Which would make room for (all else equal) more bitcoin users. More users, more momentum, more value, more hashpower, more security, more headstart before the vampire squid awakens to the significance of this radical new money.
We trust that the miners are capable, as a group, to provide the proper value for maxblocksize. As an emergent property of the market. Your solution is a centrally-planned fixed unit of size for this crucial economic variable. Yet you claim to desire decentralization? *psh!*
transaction relaying and validation is not free
Yet nodes do not get paid for this service - only miners do. Ergo, miners are the ones with the incentive to arrive at the proper value for this crucial economic variable.
You seem to think I should pay for users to transact for free or extremely cheap, forever, with no regard for the actual cost of validating/relaying transactions
You make no sense. You are already working for free.
Bitcoin isn't a public service for users to transact for free -- it is an incentive-based economy.
The only possible
incentives for operating a non-mining, fully-validating node are the ones you mentioned earlier - security and altruism. Well, maybe the ability to handle your transactions without needing to rely on others. Nevertheless, you don't get a share of the monetary incentives under any scenario. (kinda sad nodes are not renumerated, maybe someday the next satoshi will figure that problem out).