If it was clear what was right there wouldn't be a debate.
Unless of course it's artificially induced! Thank you for your thoughtful reply.
There are solid arguments as to why the blocksize limit should remain as it is, there are solid arguments as to why there should be no limit at all. There are pros and cons to each, and the significance of the pros and cons is highly correlated to personal philosophy.
Yes, agreed, and this is where you are missing the 2nd idea I alluded to: how much research have you done into centralized "authority"-based systems of control? Your "personal philosophy" depends entirely on the sources of information you have exposed yourself to, you see. Do you agree with the idea that we humans on this planet are born into a kind of prison world, wherein our minds are molded to become subservient?
I am as guilty as anyone of posting strong opinions on this debate which are fundamentally grounded in where I stand philosophically on the matter. The relative merits of either extreme can easily be argued for and against if you take a certain philosophical view point.
How do you imagine that "philosophical view points" are relevant here? It's a technical, engineering issue. If we want the best for Bitcoin, then the focus is on resilience, not on adoption rate or some other arbitrary measure. As iCEBREAKER observed, "Their Big Lie is that Bitcoin was created to replace
commercial banking, not
central banking (as if the Genesis Text was about $2 ATM fees instead of TBTF bailouts)."
If however you cannot accept that other people think differently to you, then you will start to invent circumstances to try and rationalise their behaviour some other way. Such as that they are out to destroy bitcoin, or that they are being paid, or some other such nonsense.
Are you suggesting then that the central banksters are not actively engaged in mobilizing their resources in the grandest ways they can conceive of in order to protect and preserve their millennia-old consolidation of centralized control over money? Are you of the impression, or de facto belief, that debt-based money is a reasonable and benevolent way for humans to engage in commerce?
You won't see me suggesting that you are a shill. Everything you have written so far fits exactly into the idea you are describing of someone thinking differently for innocuous reasons.
In an uncertain universe all you have are probabilities. I think the common ground we all (assuming good faith) share is that we want bitcoin not to fail catastrophically.
Yeah, assuming good faith... when the idea really is that blockchain technology by its very nature undoes the primary control vector of the control system by enabling an unstoppable transition to decentralized money. Unstoppable it is (short of some really drastic measures that would also destroy the existing financial system), whether it be Bitcoin or another, but you really think it's reasonable to assume good faith in all players? At what point, if at all, do you suppose an organized effort to protect the dying old comes into play?
I think centralisation is possibly the biggest threat in this regard. Second only to it being broken.
A further distinction is the idea of accidental (market-driven) centralization vs. deliberate (maliciously-driven) centralization.
Whats the probability that raising the blocksize limit to 8MB cases bitcoin to fail catastrophically.
Much higher than carefully scaling from 1MB to a safer number. But more interestingly, it's clearly not needed urgently, in the way Gavin & Hearn rushed to introduce XT. If you assume that all the players involved are acting in good faith, then, unless your technical understanding is on the level of the core developers, you will be basing your understanding on the false premise that there is no incentive for cryptocurrency to be undergoing the most sophisticated type of attack that could be conceived of, i.e. by co-opting and using the strongest statist minds involved in development (which just so happen to be Gavin & Hearn, and perhaps a few others like Garzik).
In neither case is it fatal though, and in both cases the proponents for each have decided that benefit outweighs risk.
The dev proponents on one side being only a few, you might wish to note. Their clueless followers, whether organic or artificial, may have skewed your impression a bit -- that being the purpose of such an operation.
The risk profiles of these tow respective options don't seem that different, but one is a hero and the other is the ugly duckling.
They are though; they are very different, even if perhaps subtly so. And this can be determined even without a dev-level understanding of the code.
You see there is that philosophy thing again. I am convinced it can run all the way through the system, and I think its the only real way that the current global financial system can be superseded.
I would suggest that it's already being superseded, in a process of
creative destruction, and this is why the people with the greatest interest in keeping the "current" (dying) global financial system afloat -- the same people who have the ability to create wars -- are playing their best cards, which is what we are witnessing here with these posters pretending to be retards.
At some point you have to have some faith in humanity and what better better way to foster that than through openness and accountability.
Absolutely, but without foolish naivete. The "bad guys" do the research, you see.
For bitcoin to reach its true potential, you are going to have to let it go. I've realised I can't have my cake and eat it. Maybe its this blue pill the doc gave me, they are usually red? Srsly though. Destroying all fiat currency and switching the whole world to a deflationary digital cryptocurrency. Wouldn't be a bad result for v1.0
Indeed, but that idea is a subset of the larger idea of decentralization. Bitcoin can fail tomorrow and it wouldn't change anything! It would at most delay the inevitable.
Does the idea of shills make more sense now?