The current price of bitcoin is based largely on expectations of future growth. Choke off that growth and I suspect a large portion of its current valuation will evaporate.
Doesn't that imply that the priority is maintaining bitcoin as a payment system? Or rather, that the only way towards "future growth" is with low fees/fast confirms? It seems that the digital gold crowd doesn't necessarily see things that way. I, for one, don't see the payment protocol as the primary value; it is wholly secondary to that of decentralized store of value.
I can't imagine how this would positively affect price.
primary value or not, price WILL be affected.
at this point if devs don't fix the TPS limit ( bumping the block size limit slightly is a fine solution for now), i'm stepping out, not because it would imply bitcoin will never be a payment system, but because I will no longer trust the dev team to make smart decisions, or make any hard decisions at all for that matter, and would deem bitcoin's development process borken. but i am confident they will up the TPS limit in some form or another in due time.
I guess I take the opposite approach. If the devs were to implement something so reckless as BIP101 (as an example), my confidence in bitcoin would be crushed and I would largely exit my investment position. At least, I would never transact on the XT chain -- outside of double spending
-- should a valid chain coexist with it. Many don't realize it, but the robust, secure system that we have now, the consensus on the protocol that exists now -- these are the priorities. When it comes to "the dev team mak[ing] smart decisions," I hope that whatever populist arguments and arbitrary timelines that segments of the community produce are tertiary to those concerns. Conceding to those largely arbitrary and tertiary concerns would indicate to me that the development process is broken.
this is perfect example of ivory tower thinking.
in reality the system would be no less robust & secure should the the limit be bumped to 2MB or even 8MB, MAYBE at 32MB your arguments would START to make SOME sense beyond ideological interest.
Re: ivory tower thinking -- cool story. The converse of that ad hominem: your opposition is based on the populist pleb argument: "Nothing can go wrong, full steam ahead, opposition is nothing more than ideology, exponential adoption, $100k bitcoins, rabble rabble."
That issues of scaling are taken so lightly is worrisome. I can entertain the argument that conditions now are testable for a 2MB limit regime. 32MB and beyond (or even 8MB) is exactly what I'm talking about -- if certain groups are so focused on a drastic (and particularly an exponential) increase, we will remain at an impasse. You nor anyone else can guarantee network security under those conditions, so let's not get ahead of ourselves.
That people have such tunnel vision that the essential definition of scaling = increasing block size limit is part of the problem. Imagine that: a spam attack of dust transactions comes along, and everyone has their panties in a wad because they are terrified that there isn't enough room on the blockchain for the spam?