I have difficulties understanding how someone who is trying to come off as an academic can get so side tracked with attempts at irrelevant digs into attempts to find bad motives and assertions that individuals are simple and driven by narrow agendas.
The personalities in "bitcon space" are fascinating, quite unlike those of other communities I have known in the past 30+ years of forum surfing. Most in a negative way, unfortunately. People like Mark Karpelès, Danny Brewster, the BFL gang, the Bitcoin Foundation, and many other far too numerous to list.
I cannot avoid taking sides in the block size limit war. I am not exactly a fan of Mike and Gavin, but on the other hand I cannot find anything good to say about the Blocstream guys. Not about character, not about ethics, not about respect for the project and its users, not even about competence. Bankruptcy is the least they deserve.
A couple days ago, Luke-Jr trolled BitcoinClassic by posting a pull request that would change the PoW algorithm to make it impossible to mine with ASICs. I then
proposed that the Core devs do that on Core. It was meant to be a just counter-trolling. But it seems that
Greg and Luke-Jr are seriously dreaming the option of doing just that in case the miners switch to Classic. It is
Idiocracy II -- but with bitcoin!