This is an attempted coup alright, but it's from idiot miners who want a bigger slice of a smaller pie. If we cave on this, they will never allow our network to become competitive enough to disrupt the banksters.
Bloating the blockchain to DOA levels will disrupt bitcoin, not the banksters.
Besides, 8mb blocks, or even 80mb blocks, aren't enough to scale to such levels. You'd need enormous storage (and bandwidth) per day to compete with the volume of banks and credit cards.
so which is it, the increase is too big and too small at the same time? We don't need to go head to head with VISA right now. We need grown up core devs who don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.