Even if we had a 2 MB block size limit today there is no guarantee that the miners would not impose limits of their own. The sudden bump is not needed.
Yes, not needed if you want to transfer more market cap to Ethereum every day.
Dumb - dumber - core developers.
Actually there is nothing dumb by doing this, it is well working plan to get financial profit out of rising altcoins when you send Bitcoins users/speculators there because they see Bitcoin is not build on solid grounds anymore when they realizing not enought capacity for everyone.
Just to show there are selfish financial interests behind, the recent HK consensus deal was possible because F2Pool agreed when at least one participant went on long Bitcoin position right before the HK meeting and if the consensus deal failed, the participant would have huge financial loss. Also Alex insisted to not waste his time by such long negatioating without a result. F2Pool clearly stated he would not agree to such deal if not these two cases - the negatioating would continue the next day probably.
macbook-air Bitcoin Miner - F2Pool
In HK, Alex asked me to “respect” his time by agree the consensus asap. Also someone else told me he had bought long position just before the roundtable, if we did not agree, he would lose huge financially. If it was not these two, I would probably have escaped away that night.