Re: How a floating blocksize limit inevitably leads towards centralization
Include the soft limit into the verification rules of as many clients as possible, and miners who first comment out that rule for themselves will be punished by the network at least until a majority of users upgrade their clients to match. The rest of the miners that didn't commetn out the rule would benefit from teh harm the first mover takes upon himself.
Huh...wha...eh??? This makes no sense. The "soft limit" is not a verification rule, it is part of the algorithm that the mining example code uses to put together a candidate block. It stops when it reaches 250kb. This doesn't mean that miners will reject blocks that are over 250kb, it just means that they will not PRODUCE them (unless someone modifies the code).
I know what it means.
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Making the 250kb a verification rule of clients is a fork (not sure if its a hard fork or a soft fork). It makes no sense to do this. You can't assume that everyone is going to upgrade to this version, nor should you assume that once this rule is adopted by clients that it will ever go away. You have effectively reduced the 1 megabyte hard limit down to a 250 kilobyte hard limit. Good job, LOL, the opposite of what people are arguing for here! 
I've done nothing of the sort. If I add a rule to my client that it quietly drops blocks that are over 250Kb, what have I done to you? Unless a majority of users also do so, I've done nothing. Perhaps I dno't drpop it from my own chain, I just don't forward it. It's something that I can do right now, and it's only effective if a significant number of others also do so. However, if it does exist, it's presence becomes an enforcement mechanism upon the soft limit that miners presently abide by, that can be easily removed simply by a significant portion of the users agreeing that it should be done, and upgrading to the next versiuon of their client that has a higher soft limit.
For all we know, there are already clients that quietly drop blocks based upon the block reward address not being in their whitelist, or any other such metric. Or even randomly. None of this would matter until half of users followed the same rule.