A Pre-emptive strike!
Nope, the cap has changed several times. It's there because transactions are included under cost so it's a trivial and cheap DoS attack to just fill up blocks until miners and nodes just give up.It's a known fact that subsidy will continue dropping until either this changes (txs being included under cost) or Bitcoin fails (because it currently depends on subsidisation).
Yes they are, and if you want to believe that mike, gavin, XT and BIP101 had nothing to do with making that happen sooner rather than later, then feel free.
Gavin and Mike have obviously been delaying all development with their nonsense. Lots of people have been distracted by this bullshit. They have certainly slowed down my contribution in a number of projects. The Core devs that have been contributing during the last couple of years (not Gavin or Mikey, who have done fuck-all in Core or anything outside of their personal projects) have been forced to waste their time because of the attack threats and the lobbying.
Either way it doesn't matter, provided the increase happens in time to ensure that block size can grow naturally, then everyone is happy right? We all win right?
If we need to increase block sizes more rather than less because other preferable scalability solutions have been stalled, then in fact we're worse off. However, it's not possible to know the exact degree of the damage the cancers have caused.
The silver lining is that they are well and truly ostracised from development, which is a great thing for Bitcoin. They can go back to work in some stupid kickstarter clone or whatever is more appropriate for them to do.
The silent sobbing is real.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3n18en/mike_hearn_banned_from_bitcoindev_sept29/
