Bullshit. It is exactly what happened. Signaling support for segwit was anemic. It was not until the NYA agreement and signaling of S2X that segwit amassed any provable support. That is what occurred, and it is clearly within the record.
NYA signaling helped to stir things up, yes, but only because it became apparent that the miners couldn't stop it and had to swallow - oops, embrace it. Segwit is good, long-term good, but myopic miners can't see beyond their weekly revenue and were herded by selfish Chinese businessmen. Yes, I know, our narratives on this matter differ. This is just incidental, and not my main point.
we, the users giving up mining - was more or less unavoidable, given the financial and existential investment in becoming a pro miner.
I don't think that is true. Who here still mines? Show of hands? I know there are some here that mine on a limited scale.
But more to the point, there was nothing preventing each of us from jumping in and mining. Sure, it seems an insurmountable expense today (but is it really? what about the small scale miners in existence?) but at the dawn of the pro miner era, there were no pro miners. Or IOW, when the mining gets tough, the tough get pro. Yes, we abdicated.
How can you be competitive at mining today? Come on, be honest in your assessments as you are flawless with your math. There maybe a few of us still doing it because of previous commitment or individual mentality, but mining simply isn't for the masses anymore*. Which was instead the point of Nakamoto's original vision. He was right on the math, but predicting the future is for wizards, not for scientists.
*Unless a change in POW helps to equalize mining power by making costs harder to scale. One RAM bank, one vote. RAM speed can't grow as CPU speed did. There are several cryptohash algorithms where you can impose a bottleneck on memory size and/or sequential memory operations. I bet this is the way POW is headed to, if any change is going to happen.
I want to understand the ultimate reason why you support your claim. What do you expect the normal user could gain from something like S2X?
As I have been saying for literally years, the stupid centrally-planned production quota that limits capacity is stifling adoption. I expect S2X (in comparison to S1X) to allow double the number of transactions per second, per hour, per day. Therefore reenabling use cases that have been obsoleted by Cores insane Raspberry Pi fetish. More use cases = more usability. Pretty simple calculus really. Oh - and lower fees besides.
What you call the "insane Raspberry Pi fetish" is the David-against-Goliath guarantee that verifying and keeping the big guys in check has a cost small enough for anyone to be able to afford it! No mining rig required. That's exactly the point of decentralization.
You want greater adoption? You're not alone, jbreher. We all do, of course! But if adoption comes at the price of pushing Joe "David" Average out of the loop, it's just Visa-like adoption, not financial freedom-adoption. Can't you see that? That's what I meant when I half-jokingly invoked Jeff Bezos' role as a Deus ex machina savior - "Here's adoption for you my children (in a celestial Amazonesque voice)... now go in peace and stop the silliness about big blocks... (epic THX thunder)."
It ain't Bitcoin Cash, but it's double the goodness of S1X.
If big blocks are what you really think you need, you've got BCH already. What's the point of S2X then?
Besides, we've shown that bigger blocks are not a problem. Why the obstinance on the part of Core? I think they're merely afraid of losing face.
Shown where? Bigger blocks are indeed a problem if usage ramps up. Latency, bandwidth and mass memory requirement would skyrocket
for simple Joe "David" Average verification, not only for mining. Censorship resistance would be seriously impacted.
I refuse to believe you don't see that - you're too smart not to. That's why I was asking for your
true motives.
I guess you just don't want to tell us.
