The free-market can solve a vast majority of problems better than central planning can, and given a proper chance to prove it, likely all problems. But a free-market of software nodes making the decision is the ideal model for governing aspects like blocksize; letting node operators choose freely just invites people with bad incentives to abuse the freedom. People like Peter R try to gently imply they want the former, when in truth, they're proposing the latter.
You are saying that people should not have this freedom because you think they will abuse it?
When you allow people to have freedom, you also need to allow them to make bad choices. You cant have it both ways, it is the consequence of freedom. I personally think it is worth it, since it brings about more good then harm overall in the greater society and civilization over the long term.
I don't "think" this, it's an observable fact.
It seems that there are two different ideologies in play:
1. It should be easy for people to express their free choice regarding the block size limit because Bitcoin is ultimately a product of the market (bottom-up / emergent phenomenon).
2. The block size limit should be set by a group of experts because people will make poor choices (top-down / policy tool).
You cannot determine only those 2 viewpoints from what I said, Peter, because I subscribe to neither.
The nodes should determine what the value is, not the developers. But
the software itself in the nodes should make the determination, not the node's human operators. I've been saying this all along; dynamic blocksize limit is the best solution to me. And that's not what you're saying at all, Peter.
You are essentially saying that people should not have the free choice. Someone does have to choose however, you can not escape this fact, under the scenario you describe it is obvious that the Core developers would choose for us. They would effectively control and decide on the future of Bitcoin under this model. I strongly disagree with this approach. I do think that this might be at the crux of our disagreement. It most certainly is an ideological disagreement, even if you disagree with that and claim truth and scientific validity it does not change that for me this is an ideological issue. In political thinking the question is often asked of whom decides, in the case of Bitcoin I think that the people or what is referred to as the economic majority should decide.
In order to achieve what you are suggesting you would have to either radically change the protocol and take the freedom out of the protocol, which i think is actually impossible to do since people can still choose to run it or not, unless you combine Bitcoin with the power and force of the state. The other way to achieve what you think would be the ideal governance model of Bitcoin would be to convince enough people that they do not have a choice or that they should defer their decision to the experts or authority instead. Neither of these scenarios seems particularly appealing to me so I definitely favor a bottom up approach where ultimately it is the users/peers that decide on the future of Bitcoin collectively in a distributed and decentralized manner, even if that means that we might sometimes not be able to agree with each other which would most likely lead to inevitable splits in the future.
This is the price of freedom, I can see how having a totalitarian approach can be appealing, no politics just centralized control by the technocrats, no splits just complete consensus and everyone has to agree with the center all of the time and for the rest of time. If enough people believed this it could work, but I am a freedom loving person so I would not want to be part of such a totalitarian construct.