Quote from: solex on June 02, 2015, 09:03:53 AM

He doesn't really want to engage in the mechanics of a block size increase right now, because his opinion is that the limit can be safely maxed out. I wish he had said this a couple of years ago in BCT because then the pros-and-cons of letting the limit be hit could have been hammered out before the question of how to change the limit needed addressing (which is the case now). Maybe he didn't say this two years ago because it wasn't his position then?

Compromise is very difficult when one side does not recognize that an urgent problem, or even just that a problem, exists.

Exactly. There's this weird mismatch in that he should be saying this *first* whenever the debate comes up. I didn't see him even comment on Mike Hearn's "Crash Landing" post, which is nevertheless the one everyone remembers and has in the back of their mind and directly opposes this position.

It's almost like he somehow wants to remain in his pessimistic curmudgeonly state, like he has a vested interest in it (not financial, but emotional/social). He has a way of not addressing the most key issues while looking like he is and looking like he's being the reasonable one. Now that I've read the Press Center thing I can see some parallels.

One classic Gmax thing is to make every statement interpretable in a safe way. For example, today's reddit post where someone was accusing Peter Todd of being biased against an increase because of his affiliation with Viacoin. I don't think there is much merit to the accusation (though that doesn't excuse Todd's sensationalism), but in Greg's reply he said, "Welcome to Reddit, 'Viacoin66'!"

He will say something that looks safe and unantagonizing (just the standard Reddit welcome), but his real purpose is to point out that the account was bran new and imply that it was obviously created to troll Viacoin/Todd. He's probably right about that, but nevertheless it's an example of what I mean where he'll say whatever serves any sort of low-blow purpose in a debate as long as it can be interpreted as not being that. I guess with his security testing mindset he has become Mr. Plausible Deniability.

OK, it's true that a lot of people do things similar to this in debate, but he has it down to an art. It has the effect of making him look blameless unless you know all the context and read between the lines. Again, I suspect this is part of core dev culture, where there is a lot of pressure not to appear inflammatory. Remember Gavin talking about "poisonous people" ruining projects (though he was talking about Luke)?