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P.S. concerning a few other members posting in this thread- When people cannot make a coherent and reasonable argument and have to rely ad hominems and pointless emotional ramblings that fail to complete a thought, I will simply ignore them as we should all strive to raise our standards. This does not indicate that I suggest people ignore others they disagree with or even dislike, but merely identify those that don't meet the minimum criteria of being capable of a valid conversation.
From all others, I am interested to hear clear and reasoned arguments against Gavin's Hardfork scalability road map.
1) If internet infrastructure providers are instructed to attack P2P traffic as a condition of their being allowed to operate and under the guise of protection against crime, terrorism, or disruption of monetary systems, then there is a distinct correlation between the transaction rate and the ability of Bitcoin to function under such constraints. At 7 TPS it is not impossible that Bitcoin could continue to function using such methods as steganography and out-of-band networks. Bitcoin enjoys value in part because it has some theoretical potential to survive a dedicated and forceful attack, and I absolutely don't rule out the potential for such a thing as we move into the future (which is heavily postulated to involve a 'cyber 9/11 event.')
2) Bitcoin appealed to me in the first place for it's corner-case and unique ability to allow me to support Wikileaks. I appreciate Wikileaks for the service it is providing to my country (the U.S.) I am perfectly happy to pay high fees for a solution which provides capabilities which I cannot find elsewhere. For 99% of what I do existing solutions work fine (and vastly better than Bitcoin) and I'll continue to use them.
3) At 140 TPS Bitcoin is still just a corner-case monetary network. It is woefully short of being some sort of global exchange currency. Bumping up to this rate will simply make the solution less defensible for no particular gain.
4) The monetary inducement to provide decentralized mining support will not change no matter what the transaction rate or fee structure. It will always approach zero and will likely dip below. So, here again, bumping up the rate to 140 TPS serves no purpose other than to further consolidate support to a small group of large players who can subsidize their costs with other revenue streams.
5) A much better solution for everyone is to scale by use of sidechains. Economically due to the two-way-peg it will not impact Bitcoin's money supply and will promote higher fees since much activity is distilled into fewer reserve transactions. Further, sidechain efforts will have incentive to support native Bitcoin since it is key to their function as well as to their value store. Users benefit by having a variety of options, many of the options being mutually exclusive. They will also foster increased privacy and be more challenging to attack (being a swarm and generally much more flexible and developmentally agile.)