whats disheartening is seeing how poeple are so afraid of the tiniest changes, bitcoin development grinds to a halt.
Even if people make a hard fork to 1.5MB, it wouldn't be tiniest of changes.
Stopping mining pools to run a new daemon is easy and all, but the problem is that the world wouldn't update all at once, and the whole Bitcoin "ecosystem" would have a temporary problem with the "2 blockchains".
I think they can all update at once, like BitcoinXT planned to do, everyone run the new software which runs old code until some high percentage of blocks are hashing with the new version. and one time there was an emergency hard fork without any of this fancy way of updating everyone all at once and it took a few hours for the new chain to catch up.
i'd argue that not changing the 1MB is a change in itself, we were promised this limit would move up as needed. satoshi knew what that would do, and he talked about SPV clients becoming more important as time went on. not changing the limit is changing the game plan in a big way.
"i'd argue that not changing the 1MB is a change in itself" <--- I like this point. I would add that not changing is not the same and shouldn't be evaluated as a proxy for something else that isn't yet invented or otherwise ready-to-go as an alternative (ex: sidechains or LN). From what I can understand, sidechains and LN will be groundbreaking/important regardless of blocksize. I get the feeling that a lot of folks see sidechains/ln as mutually exclusive w/ XT or any other blocksize increase BIP.
Related question: If you have time, what are the best two or three arguments against raising blocksize in your (or anybody else's) opinion, notwithstanding whether you agree with them?
My background is not tech, and I'm positive I'm in the same boat w/ tons of folks, so some short bullet points would be helpful for us non-techies. From what I can tell, the best arguments against increasing blocksize are things like: 1) security (decreased node count), 2) unreasonable economic barriers (objections based on specific BIPs (Blacklisting argument against XT) seem less concerning b/c they're fixable and negotiable). Are there obvious solutions to the strongest arguments (whatever those are to you) that resolve the concern and still increase blocksize?
1. Centralization of nodes
2. Centralization of miners