Quote from: Quickseller on July 06, 2016, 05:29:09 PM

The "ridiculous plan" (or some derivative thereof) is supported by ~the entire Bitcoin economy (note that the Chinese exchanges also support larger blocks based on the stances of the Chinese pools that are owned by the same entities).

That statement is ignorant and those companies surely don't represent "~ the entire Bitcoin economy". BIP101 is one of the worst proposals that I've seen so far. Should I mention that the creator of this BIP either was not aware or forgot to address the problem of quadratic validation time (I don't recall added limitations) which just shows how 'competent' they are (in addition to 'how much testing they've done'). Additionally, the grace period on that BIP is horrible. Ask any experienced engineer who has worked on large scale systems about the time required for infrastructural upgrades.

Quote from: Quickseller on July 06, 2016, 05:29:09 PM

It is only the blockstream core devs, who work for a company who can only possibly turn a profit if transaction fees skyrocket, as well as the one person who can effectively control the public conversation about the block size, preventing many "normal" people from being well informed (although this really does not matter because most normal people's opinions are not going to matter in terms if the economy accepts a fork or not).

Propaganda bullshit as always.

Quote from: BillyBobZorton on July 06, 2016, 05:36:56 PM

Classic developers are trash, so are all the rest of hard forking attempts compared to Core developer team. It's suicide to switch to any other team so when it's all said and done they will not do it.

Maxwell has made a comment about those 'experienced developers' in a post found here.

Quote from: The00Dustin on July 06, 2016, 06:05:59 PM

However, segwit encourages pretend decentralization (if you don't have the witness data, you aren't protecting the network's data) and things like lightning require gatekeepers that are even more centralized still.

Lightning does not require (definitely not the right word) gatekeepers, it is just more optimal to use them (i.e. hubs). Think of it as a system that provides 'path-finding' for payment channels.

Quote from: The00Dustin on July 06, 2016, 06:05:59 PM

I'm not saying centralizing microtransactions off-chain is a problem, but the argument that decentralization is so important that we should centralize stuff is not a very good one.

The Bitcoin blockchain remains decentralized and Lightning can not have an negative affect on that. The possible centralization of Lightning is another topic.