It feels to me like a major shift occurred today.  It was caused in part by Gavin and Mike completing the patch to support larger block sizes, but I think it was actually caused more so by a foolish move made on the battlefield-that-was-reddit today.  In an act of desperation, the mods at /r/bitcoin threw their swords.  

What do I mean by "throwing one's sword?"  I'll have to explain it with a story about my childhood…

...The town I grew up in (about an hour outside of Vancouver) seemed perfectly normal to me as a kid, but when I look back now, it was actually pretty rough.  It was home to hundreds of Hell's Angels and it served as a sort of distribution center in the drug trade.  

Anyways, there were lots of fights between groups of boys when I was growing up.  I was never really a part of it, but I was fascinated and paid attention to the dynamics of the process.  One strange behaviour I witnessed was that the last act of the losing faction of boys was always to throw their weapons.  It was such a stupid thing to do, because the baseball bat or hockey stick would rarely hit the intended target, and in the few times that it did, it would be travelling at such a reduced velocity that the impact imparted to the victim was superficial at best.  

And then the weaponless boys would get their butts kicked.

It turns out that this is a sort of a natural human reaction to severe stress.  As a last resort, we throw whatever we have left and hope for the best.  In the movies, it always works; in real life, the opposite is true.  

Of course the weapon of a mod is censorship.  Today was the day that the mods at /r/bitcoin threw their weapons.