Huge numbers of Bitcoin companies will be in locations where high-speed fiber is present. For people with poor internet service there should eventually be an alternative: satellite broadcasting of transactions and blocks, as per Jeff Garzik's bitsats proposal.
So it's not acceptable for the poor people to rely on 3rd parties... unless it's to trust them with the most important part: full nodes. The
satellite thing is a total joke, and does nothing to enhance security.
You're describing a world in which any derp with a satoshi gets to spam the network with his coffee purchase, and any government can take over the network if they control the high bandwidth regions. This is backwards and misses the point of bitcoin. "Hash cash" wasn't the revolution; distributed consensus was. Bitcoin is not valuable because "everybody has access." It's valuable because nobody can counterfeit.
Satellites, like ordinary nodes, are not individually trusted. It is the whole network which is to be trusted.
There is a distinction between "valid/worthwhile" and "junk/spam" transactions:
If >50% of the full nodes accept a transaction into their mempools, whether for a coffee or a car, then it is valid/worthwhile.
If >50% want to reject a particular transaction then it is junk/spam.
Fortunately IBLT will help make this a clearer process by encouraging strong consensus on unconfirmed tx. For the record, my position is that micro-tx should be handled off-chain. Paying for a coffee is not a micro-tx, IMHO.
I've asked MP. While nobody can really know the future, turns out what we'll likely do is start an entirely new coin, this time guaranteed to never be hard-forked; not by a bunch of coder nobodies, but by MP himself. In practice that'll most likely work out to simply staying with the old version and replacing some code monkeys. This, mind you, not because we really care all that much if it's 1 Mb or 100 Gb, but because the precedent of hardforking "for change" is intolerable. We'll find ourselves in due time under a lot more pressure to fuck up Bitcoin than some vague "I can't manage to envision the future" sort of bs.
[my bold emphasis]
The reality of MP's position is that he does not want Bitcoin changed, which is why he runs an old version of Bitcoin Core, and has drawn a red line at the 1MB fork. He doesn't really care if the block limit is 1MB or 100GB, it's the principle of
changing Bitcoin without MP's permission, which is unacceptable.Anyone else who has an opinion on that can fill in the blank: "________________".