It's funny you say that, because every time you talk about "free market" you come with things that have nothing to do with the concept. You also insist that it has something to do with ideology to see something as a "free market".


Bitcoin was designed so that its code-defined parameters couldn't be redefined by users ("bottom up") and this is a feature. Imagine if gold could be redefined by holders of gold merely by their agreement. It would be the anti-gold: gold works as a store of value because its properties cannot be changed in a feasible manner (and certainly you cannot alter the gold of others no matter how much support your "ideas" have).

Bitcoin's "physical properties" are its code. When, like in the case of the blocksize cap, there is a general agreement that one of these "physical properties" of Bitcoin should be changed, it's important to understand the contradiction this entails to something that is intended to be money/store of value to introduce changes to it. Bitcoin is in this sense in a strong contradiction of being both still experimental software that requires changes, and that ideally it would need zero changes so the "physical properties" analogy of "digital gold" stands on its own.

The problem here is not one of ideologies, as largely (except Mike Hearn and an increasing number of mainstreamers, who are socialists and statists) the ideologies of bitcoiners are strongly for free market capitalism.

It's a problem of vision / understanding. Either see Bitcoin as a payment channel tool or as a distributed database, not money and not commodity, in which case obviously introducing major changes and revisions is a "software" thing. For this school of thought, destroying the underlying assumption that the main properties of Bitcoin cannot be changed is not a big deal. This kills Bitcoin as a store of value. I'd argue that some even want this to happen. This is why I'm not that surprised when you say that if people want, let them introduce inflation in Bitcoin and stuff like that. Or when you interchangeably talk about forks of the chain and forks of the code.

The block size limit like any other parameters of Bitcoin were set by either Satoshi or the devs after him. This is "2" as you said above, and this is the way Bitcoin as we know it. The market balance mechanisms were also set up by developers. You blow up the stability of these mechanisms and you have made Bitcoin utterly pointless. The very system is made so that users running arbitrary protocols just doesn't work for them. What you suggest by "1" is political money and it will never work. Why don't you just try it separately and leave the Bitcoin network alone?