tvbcof, in an alternate universe where we were ALREADY dropping 50MB blocks or so every 10 minutes your arguments would be very sound.  But you can run a full node on a freakin' Raspberry PI!  This very premature limiting of the blockchain size, coupled with Blockstream's possibly competitive technologies, is what makes us cry foul.

We don't need to shunt Bitcoin off into a settlement-only currency just yet.  We could grow 50 times greater before we have to think about doing that, and there is tremendous value in doing so.  For one, it would allow all the layered technologies time to develop.  And also, we'd probably have 50-100x more users, which IMHO pushes bitcoin over the mass adoption chasm.


I think we are at the polarization point in this debate where people are making "arguments" that they barely even believe themselves -- on both sides.  And no one is actually responding to the other side's concerns.  For example, I have not read any response to the problem that if bitcoin becomes a settlement currency it will centralize because the only people who will care to run full nodes will be companies who do settlement.

At this point further discussion is useless.  So we shall proceed with the fork and/or BIP 100 and hope to gain a clear majority.  If that point comes you'll have an interesting choice: you'll be on an old fork that is essentially an altcoin with (as you just described above) significant technical limitations.  So your fork will have neither technical or largest-user advantage.  In such a situation, I hope that you will choose to come over to the majority fork.