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I see a fair amount of utility in having an XT fork which siphoned off a sizable number of 'bitcoiners' who are deeply ignorant about the principles of the system and are mostly MultiBitch-class users who add no value.
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Disgusting. Abhorrent. Bullshit.
Their argument has been backwards from the start. They're saying that people who support larger blocks want to change the way Bitcoin works and that they need to justify that change. But in reality, support for larger blocks is only ensuring Bitcoin continues to work in the same way it works now and always has done. A permissionless blockchain that's
open to all. That's what we signed up for. It's the anti-fork crowd that need to justify forcing full blocks onto everyone and the
only reason they can come up with is that it guarantees security for them and no one else matters. If you only want Bitcoin to benefit early adopters and risk driving everyone else away, then oppose larger blocks. But if you want an open system that's available for anyone to use, you'll support larger blocks.
The 'open to all' is EXACTLY the reason I feel as I do. I am very confident that if bitcoin bloats under the incorrect notion that 'open to all' means 'open to all for free' rather than 'open to all who are willing to support it' it will NOT be 'open to all' by any stretch.
I practice what I preach. I try to pay the equiv of around $10 per transaction in fees. This figure would result in a fee reward to infrastructure supporters which is big enough to keep them interested but small enough to not justify football sized datacenters. It is also a terrific deal for me both in terms of costs compared to international wires, and in performance (minutes rather than days.)
I also long to re-join my 'peasant' peers and am very much looking forward to sidechains where I can micro-tip and buy coffee and what-not without fucking up the system.
I would also be happy to use XT from my Google Wallet and get 'cash back' and other 'free' perks for allowing them to spy on me and cut me off from supporting 'insurgent' entities (like Wikileaks who I feel is doing the U.S. a great service.) I simply don't want that to be my only option.
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I will repeat that 'Multibitch-class' users ad no value to the core system. They are simply drones who, at best, push Bitcoin into a form I don't like. At worst the will act, unbeknownst to themselves, as a botnet to DDOS the supporters I do respect.
Where I don't practice what I preach at this point is that I don't actively support the system. Even at the 1MB setting, it is impractical for bandwidth reasons to run a full node behind my $80/mo broadband connection. As for contributing anything in the way of code, testing, etc, as long as Hearn (who I consider to be a rat bastard) and Andresen (who I consider to be Hearn's philosophically retarded poodle) have anything to do with Bitcoin it's simply not worth wasting my efforts over.