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 consensusI wholeheartedly agree that the definition of "better" varies. I disagree that every participant is highly motivated to make the "system" better, because to me that infers a sort of moral and fair approach. I don't see that. I see manipulation, censorship, lies, misdirection. Of course that is my opinion based on my observations. And while others may have different opinions - I sort of like mine for a simple reason.... I am one of the rare people without an agenda loyalty to any of the specific paths. I dislike XT for many reasons, but primarily because it is lazy. It does not encourage much thought into the ongoing design of bitcoin. It just says, make the blocks so big it is disgusting, and pack Pack PACK them with all the crap you can think. And yes, I do think that leads to a much faster centralization that bothers me. I dislike 1mb because it is a blatant crippling of the possibilities, and I say blatant because there is a CLEAR Conflict of Interest involved.
I agree and disagree in various ways with your last 2 sentences.
I think a middle of the road compromise, increasing to 2 mb, and building in a few years of slow, measured increases, then capping it ---WOULD BE ACCEPTED by a Huge Majority. And I am not a super tech in this, but I have read and watched and studied more than most, and I just don't see that a middle road solution would be threatening at all - IF we could get a decent consensus. ALL it would take is someone willing to DO IT. I mean, if it were thrown out like XT - and triggered by the same "voting" mechanism - then I honestly think that it would get the 750 blocks. And I also think that most of Core-Dev is perfectly aware of that. That is why the tricks, censorship, lying manipulations etc..... no one with Commit Auth will do it. I honestly think it would have to be Gavin. And it WOULD work.
And ALL paths would be given reasonable growing room to explore possibilities. And at that point in the future that whatever small, measured increase in size hits the new cap - then there will be CLEARER data. And perhaps there is a then a fight for another increase path - or perhaps sidechains are actually ready and built out and widely so entrenched that they are doing their job and no more increases are necessary. Most likely it would be that sidechains would be established, and well received, but also direct bitcoin use as currency would be established, and another short ramp up in blocksize would be implemented. But we wouldn't have to fear centralization because we'd have time and data to tell us what to do - along with the expected technological advances that would be coming along with the added time gained. And there might even be something NEW we haven't even seen yet that emerges. Something we'll NEVER see if we can't even at least explore this new technology a bit instead of crippling it right out of the womb!