Quote from: Lauda on June 25, 2016, 08:26:02 AM

The people who had signed that agreement, "vouched" to deliver a HF proposal

The antagonism and misrepresentations-- things like saying core agreed, that blockstream is core, that people were planning on working on this _before_ segwit, that miners would refuse segwit (a capacity increase) unless there were some hardfork, etc-- along with F2Pool not upholding their end seem to have really demoralized most of the people involved there, and cause some loss of face in the technical community for them. They were working on some designs but I think the threats caused them to depriortize that effort. (Consider, if they post a proposal and it arms more threatening behavior, they'll take some blame for facilitating that-- and that is a situation which would be bad for the value of their Bitcoin holdings as well as their professional reputations) In effect, this work is currently pre-undermined because a large body of people won't touch it with a ten foot poll because it's tied up with intolerable behavior, and that makes it a lot less interesting to work on.

Really the biggest lesson from the earlier chapters of this debacle is that you can't convince principled people in the community with threats. Probably the worst thing that could have been done in this blocksize nonsense was running to the mass media with "Bitcoin is forking!" before even writing a BIP... The whole value prop of Bitcoin depends on Bitcoin being resistant to political coercion. Convincing people that we all have a common shared interest to cooperatively move in particular directions that benefit everyone is a strategy that works (which is why segwit itself has such broad support, that even most people that prefer other things admit that its a really good move). That works because it is a way to encourage change that, if it works, doesn't come with without too much risk of adverse change in the future. If threats and antagonism or PR campaigns based on ignorance (Make Bitcoin Great Again!) are shown to be a successful way to enact change (even otherwise good changes), then they could be abused in the future to make bad changes (such as transaction censorship or undermining the systems' monetary policy) and that cannot be allowed to happen if Bitcoin is to remain valuable: If someone could credibly argue that in the past changes were pushed through via threatening actions by a small set of high hash-power miners this would be powerful FUD that would erode the value proposition. I think a lot of people (including a lot of big miners) are committed to avoiding that outcome.