if you request transactions the old way will get a transaction without a witness
new clients have the options now to have transactions with witness or without
so goodluck old clients. your just going to relay transactions that are uncheckable and meaningless and you cant do anything about it.. making you redundant and a limp node
Yes. It's like the government of the swiss says, "dear people of swiss, our constitution actually demands a referendum for us to do this properly. But since we don't trust your decision, we decided the best-solution is to tricky-track around the problem, so that we can do it without a referendum. That's brilliant. It ensures the system's stability."
The same is with RBF, no matter if opt-in or full. If it goes through, it forces every node to confirm the existance of rbf.
I'm really curious how many people will upgrade the next core version. It could happen we'll find bitcoin soon in some state of ungovernability, like belgium, where even the leading party (=core) is unable to push needed things forward.
While I'm for the decentralization of development, I'm not sure if such a state is better than what we have now.
I am adamant that it is a superior state to what we have now, if we cannot achieve such a state I would lose much of my interest in Bitcoin and I would consider the governance mechanism of Bitcoin to have failed, this is the first real test of this mechanism so the outcome is hard to know, since there is no historical precedent to this situation. This is a experiment in decentralized governance.
After all if we had to be reliant and dependent upon a centralized authority in the form of Core in order for Bitcoin to survive then this would defeat the very point of "trust" without centralized authority. I think that these alternative implementations will increase the blocksize limit more and faster then Core would.
However I do suspect that under a more decentralized model of governance that it could slow down development in other regards. Since implementations would need to negotiate any consensus critical changes with other implementations and the wider community more then they presently would. This could have the effect of slowing down development though it would also make development in Bitcoin more conservative, which I would actually consider a positive development.