and now this. i really think it's a power play by the devs to keep control. marcus said it flat out. they want control.
This does appear to be a power struggle between the Bitcoin Foundation and the "core developers".
It appears that the Foundation side has decided that the "core developers" are dispensable and that they are gaining too much leverage which is dangerous given their business conflict-of-interest with Blockstream.
All of this is indicative of the fact that Bitcoin is not yet on auto-pilot and is not decentralized. It is rather a power struggle of vested interests.
It doesn't matter which direction this power play goes because the writing in already on the wall as to the overall outcome of Bitcoin core sinking into a morass and either a subsumption or orthogonal alternative via pegged side chains will eventually emerge.
This is why I have suggested to Gregory that they just give up the control and march on. Their tech can't be controlled by Bitcoin core, so they should just ignore this power struggle and focus on where their inherit power is implicit.
Any way, none of it matters to my work (not even the timing of the viability of pegged side chains). I can carry on where my power is implicit.
What I do know is that after spending a lot of time reading about Bitcoin for the past several years, and getting a feel for some of the people involved, I would prefer to stay far, far away from anything that is related to Mike Hearn. For the life of me, I can't even understand why someone like him is interested in Bitcoin (unless it's to change it into something else entirely). I'm thankful that he has barely touched Bitcoin Core.
So I oppose BitcoinXT, but not necessarily a block size increase.
Astute separation-of-concerns.
The other thing I don't understand is why people focus on the network overhead rather than the overhead to run a single node. As far as I can see, this should always be roughly O(n).
Its hard to scare people when you talk about O(n) costs per node.
Scary only if you want anyone in the world to be able to directly participate in mining consensus.
If you don't care about some centralization due to the regulatory oversight (an example of an out-of-band incentive that obviates the assumption of a Nash equilibrium) that can placed on those who can meet much higher minimum resource requirements, then sure go on your merry way.
Regulatory capture is incestuous.
But don't even begin to dream about on-the-block-chain micropayments with any semblance of decentralization.