Re: Reponce to Roger Ver's "Time to End the Block-Size Blockade" essay
Yes nodes can ignore segwit and consider it an altcoin, they can prune, they can reject inbound...
No, they can't consider Segwit "an altcoin".Sure they can, in fact, any nodes that don't upgrade to a segwit friendly version will consider pure segwit txs to be an altcoin.
It's important to recognize that hardware and internet bandwidth has improved over the last 7 years.
People keep saying that, yet the number of nodes is on a steady decline. Do I have to note that the resource usage kept growing tremendously over the 7 years?Check your premises, running the qt client used to be the most common way to interact with the network, now it's not. SPV type interaction is well developed and widespread at this point.
This is where the philosophical difference comes to a head. Some feel that without a production quota on blocksize, set by a priesthood of Core devs, miners would simply bloat blocks to infinity.
They certainly would not be the first 'group' to spam the network in an attempt to support their vision.Incoherent non sequitur.
It would and will exist with miners facing the free market and subsequently setting their own production levels. Beware the dangers of a centrally planned economy.
So in a scenario in which miners get paid to set them to abrupt levels, all is fine right? 
You strongly favor a centrally planned economy, which is a position, just not one I agree with.