Quote from: r0ach on January 17, 2016, 01:54:15 AM

It's funny how the dev side has more small blockers, while the speculation side is almost entirely large blockers nowadays. Why is this? Because the dev side doesn't understand markets. People evaluate stocks by things like cash on hand and future expansion prospects. If blocks are full, this is bad for speculators because you're no longer getting price appreciation from increased utility, but relying entirely on things like Gresham's law to push the price up for your artificial scarcity tokens with people hoarding it.

Relying on price appreciation through artificial scarcity of coin count and block space is a magician's trick. It may or may not work, because as we all know, things like Litecoin and a million other altcoins exist. No matter what you believe is the proper technical solution to the problem, the wise speculator, economist, or even honest human being is going to prefer to increase price via increased utility rather than increase solely by trying to recruit people to invest more. If you're not increasing utility, that's the point where it does turn into kind of a scheme. Unless you're going to try and claim the markets currently have vastly undervalued Bitcoin, but that's a different argument.

Things like Lightning Network will increase utility a lot by increasing throughput, the only problem is, it's currently nowhere to be seen. People demand an increase in utility now, otherwise they feel stupid to invest or tell others to do so because it seems like a greater fool theory when utility is not increasing. This is what the devs do not understand, and Segwit is kinda too little, too late. This is the reason why I believe the blockchain does need an increase, to allow expansion until something like Lightning Network is released (assuming it works).

The bottom line is, due to the factors cited above, an increase in block size can really only be beneficial for price, assuming it didn't infringe upon decentralization, and you would need very big blocks to centralize things more in comparison to the size of mining pools that already exist. Whether you're trying to avoid the greater fool theory, or if all you care about is making money and don't give a shit about anything else, you're going to be in the large(r) block camp.

Interesting observation. I also wondered why the smallblockers have no problem with a central planning of the tx quotum. But software engineers are actually central planners by profession. More market oriented people understand better that limiting usage of Bitcoin now will not help it grow. You can't just say "hey, we need an extra year for implementing LN, can you all take a break?". You'll lose the momentum.