What are you so afraid of, Eric? If Mike's fork is successful, consensus is reached around larger blocks. If it is rejected, the status quo will remain for now. Network consensus, NOT CORE DEVELOPER CONSENSUS, is the only thing that matters, and those that go against network consensus will be severely punished with complete loss of income.
I fully agree that core developers are not the only people who should have a say in this. But again, we’re not talking about merely forking some open source project - we’re talking about forking a ledger representing real assets that real people are holding…and I think it’s fair to say that the risk of permanent ledger forks far outweighs whatever benefits any change in the protocol might bring. And this would be true even if there were unanimous agreement that the change is good (which there clearly IS NOT in this case) but the deployment mechanism could still break things.
If anything we should attempt a hard fork with a less contentious change first, just to test deployability.
I'm not sure who appointed the core devs some sort of Bitcoin Gods that can hold up any change that they happen to disagree with. It seems like the core devs are scared to death that the bitcoin network may change without their blessing, so they go on and on about how terrible hard forks are. Hard forks are the only way to keep core devs in check.
Again, let’s figure out a hard fork mechanism and test it with a far less contentious change first
Despite significant past technical bitcoin achievements, two of the most vocal opponents to a reasonable blocksize increase work for a company (Blockstream) that stands to profit directly from artificially limiting the blocksize. The whole situation reeks. Because of such a blatant conflict of interest, the ethical thing to do would be for them to either resign from Blockstream or immediately withdraw themselves from the blocksize debate. This is the type of stuff that I hoped would end with Bitcoin, but alas, I guess human nature never changes.
For the record, I do not work for Blockstream. Neither do a bunch of other people who have published a number of concerns. Very few of the concerns I’ve seen from the technical community seem to be motivated primarily by profit motives.
It should also be pointed out that *not* making drastic changes is the default consensus policy…and the burden of justifying a change falls on those who want to make the change. Again, the risk of permanent ledger forks far outweighs whatever benefits protocol changes might bring.
Personally, I think miners should give Bitcoin XT a serious look. Miners need to realize that they are in direct competition with the lightning network and sidechains for fees. Miners, ask yourselves if you think you'll earn more fees with 1 MB blocks and more off-chain transactions or with 8 MB blocks and more on-chain transactions…
Miners are NOT in direct competition with the lightning network and sidechains - these claims are patently false. I recommend you take a look at these ideas and understand them a little better before trying to make any such claims. Again, I do not work for Blockstream…and my agenda in this post is not to promote either of these ideas…but with all due respect, I do not think you properly understand them at all.
The longer this debate drags on, the more I agree with BIP 100 and Jeff Garzik because the core devs are already being influenced by outside forces and should not have complete control of the blocksize. It's also interesting to note that most of the mining hashpower is already voting for 8MB blocks BIP100 style.
I don’t think the concern here is so much that some people want to increase block size. It’s the *way* in which this change is being pushed that is deeply problematic.