My initial reaction is that I don't think its a good idea to empower non-technical people with the ability to control such an important variable with a click of a button. I suppose they would be held into account by the miners and this would essentially be a node vote which would allow individual nodes to confirm larger blocks easier. The difference may not be significant as an attacker isn't going to be limited by the code and this could be a signal to allow users to vote. This change appears to me to have more political implications than anything.
Quite right. The choice of settings effectively becomes a vote on what you support.
Just as it is now, the miners actually decide what size of blocks they want to create, based on their knowledge of the network and its participants.
As an end user, you could set your limits high enough not to worry about them for the foreseeable future.
And there are
plans to make it easier for end users to track the limit growth curves of BIPs they agree with, which makes it easier for them to express their views on the policy.To prevent them from isolating themselves from the emerging consensus, there will be a warning message issued by the BU client if the user's settings are too restrictive to continue following the longest chain.
This clarifies a lot. This indicates that BU is more of a political difference than technical one. Re-flexibly I am drawn to this idea as it represents empowering the users with more of a voice where they have more of a stake in the decision process and this could be a method of incentivizing full nodes. On the flip side this does take away some of the power from developers and this can have some negative consequences as technical decisions based upon meritocracy now become political decisions based upon node vote for BIPs. Another concern is that many of these very talented developers are donating their time on a volunteer basis and one of the primary things that incentivizes their contributions is them having a say in the direction of this open source project.
I am not so naive to believe there are no personal motivations behind some of the developers steering code to favor their side business as one of their motivations, but have more of a nuanced view and believe developers have multiple motivations from securing the code and peoples investments (including their own) , to philosophical motivations for what bitcoin represents and its impact upon society, to enjoying the challenge of the project and fun of learning.
BU brings up many complex issues about governance which I will have to reflect upon more.