Re: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

I think I've heard all the arguments, but I still cannot understand the opposition to increasing the blocksize.

I don't have an (maybe I should say: a valid) opinion on the block size debate. I would prefer to err on the side of decentralization, but at this point I'm not even sure what that is. I think magic numbers are a poor solution (but I'm sure they are sometimes necessary).

I'm not afraid of forks, like most people seem to be. I think that everyone should be prepared for how they will deal with possible forks in the future.

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.

Disclaimer: I use Mycelium for convenience from time to time and do not know whether or not that is based on any of Hearn's BitcoinJ.

thanks Holiday,

I find myself thinking similar things, ultimately I'm for decentralization, and while I've been horrified by some of Mikes off the cuff ideas in the past, I am largely inspired by the ideas he has pushed through to fruition.

to me decentralization = more distributed, and having centralized control by a group of people no matter their track record is still centralization, Mike is not my first choice for a dictator, but I respect that he doesn't care to do what other people think he should do, but is going to do what he thinks is best that makes it easy to follow him, so long as we are going to the same place and easy to part ways when he decides to go somewhere strange.

I may not agree with him on many issues despite that, decentralization of control is the future for Bitcoin. I'm happy with the understanding that running an XT node is not giving him the keys to Bitcoin but doing just the posit, distributing the control system.

imagine the worst case; he is lead core dev dictator and makes a pig headed wrong move with the code.

just refuse to update or just fork him off.

That's the worst case, the first time you do it is the hardest, once we fork from Core, it'll be easier to do it again, next time there will be more options I hope, I don't expect the Core developers to stop developing.

personally, if XT becomes a reality, i don't expect there to be a surviving Core for devs to dev on. value will quickly be sucked out of Core and those devs left behind will become totally irrelevant with their careers shattered. and that's b/c there has been enough of a discussion over this obvious 1MB obstruction that i'd think that there will be no for profits who will be willing to hitch their future to decision making by Blockstream. esp true for Nasdaq and NYSE who want and need thousands of cheap, reliable tx's throughput on the MC, the most secure and apolitical one.

once this happens, Gavin and Mike will be happy to recruit a whole new core dev team to minimize the chances of such a huge disagreement happening once again. everyone is for diversity but this hostage situation is way over the top and can't be tolerated.