I personally am a bit taken back by the current situation. Bitcoin has such promise. If a few reasonable changes were made, it COULD become a global currency, probably THE global currency. Honestly, it has everything going for it - a huge infrastructure buildout, pretty solid user base, good name recognition, almost 10 years of solid debugging and real world lab experience, and yet..... why the heck am I getting this impending sense of doom lately?
I am totally serious. I am totally shocked that this little Blockstream Player / Core-Dev group is so blind to what they are squandering, and at how strongly rebellion is brewing. Right now it would not take much for everyone to start running for the exits, or towards another solution. And we KNOW that other solutions are being worked on.
I have a feeling that bitcoin will eventually overcome all these difficulties and prove that a decentralized system has its own decision making intelligence
In a centralized system like presidential election, nearly half of the people do not vote since they don't like any of those candidates or they don't care who rules. However the participants in a decentralized system all cares about the system development and running related issues, since these directly affect their own business
This means every participants here are highly motivated to make the system better. Of course the definition of better varies drastically from person to person, but unless they can reach a major consensus, they are not going anywhere. They can just fork as they will, and their fork will become an alt-coin and value crash to almost nothing. So after several such try, they will eventually agree that consensus is the king, they will try to make compromise and try to listen to other's idea until they finally find a major consensus that everyone can live with
It takes time to reach consensus. It is very easy to reach consensus on 1+1=2 since it does not take more than a few minutes to explain to the most illiterate person. But to reach consensus on if Segwit or 8MB block is a good idea, these are very time consuming task due to the complexity they involved, and it will take much longer time to reach agreement among all the major stake holders, maybe never. I guess only small changes have a chance to reach consensus