...
And I was
so hoping we could discuss the following:
In one hand they are stopping block size increase citing lack of consensus, and in other hand they are force feeding RBF & SegWit without consensus.
Removing the rules against actions that the network protocol
expressly forbids against the will of an economically significant portion of users, and risking a persistent ledger split in the process is not a comparable thing. It's something that Bitcoin Core strongly believe it does not have the moral or technical authority to do, and attempting to do so would be a failure to uphold the principles of the system. It's not something to do lightly, and people who think that it's okay to change the system's rules out from under users who own coins in it are not people that I'd want to be taking advice from-- that kind of thinking is counter to the entire Bitcoin value proposition.
So just to be clear - do you maintain that block size increases are necessarily "Removing the rules against actions that the network protocol
expressly forbids", and are therefore necessarily evil?
Finally--at some point the capacity increases from the above may not be enough. Delivery on relay improvements, segwit fraud proofs, dynamic block size controls, and other advances in technology will reduce the risk and therefore controversy around moderate block size increase proposals (such as 2/4/8 rescaled to respect segwit's increase).
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Capacity increases for the Bitcoin system:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-December/011865.htmlIf a miner violates the hard rules of the system they are simply not miners anymore as far as all the nodes are concerned.
For better or worse (I would say for worse), in this era of industrial mining, non-mining nodes have essentially zero power. Any viable mining operation has sufficient resources to run a node of its own, and connect explicitly to other mining entities that share its philosophy. The only power outside of miners is the threat that users abandon the chain en masse.
I think its safe to say non-mining nodes *never* had any power. In the white paper the word 'node' was synonymous with the word 'miner'. It's only over time that this 'node/miner' separation has arisen.
Bitcoin is defined by hashrate, and the arguments (from all sides, me included heh) that something else *should* matter seem a bit petulant!
The industrialisation of mining has happened exactly as predicted. The mechanisms to keep the big guys check are still there. One of which I think is exactly what you describe the threat that they cannot do anything that would cause user's to abandon it.
Miner's and users are the yin and yang of the network. Developers and non-mining nodes grease the wheels but ultimately have no power.
The code's out of the bag so to speak. If the chinese miners decide they want 2MB, even if they don't use Classic, or BU, they could always just roll their own.