I think that are specifically wrong in saying that you are anti controversial hard forks, I think that increasing the blocksize will always be controversial because of the culture of believe that has now been build up in the Bitcoin community, according to that reasoning we should therefore never increase the blocksize limit? I think this is fundamentally flawed, especially considering how important a parameter this blocksize limit actually is. I think part of the difference in our opinion is that you are also not taking the competition into account.

I think that both sides suspect each other of being part of a psychological operation by a possible a government agency in order to disrupt the Bitcoin community, historically this does not even seem that unlikely. There is a long history of infiltration and disruption by government agencies in order to counter organizations and communities they see as threatening.

Though personally I would find it much more likely that their goal would be to restrict and disrupt the original plan of Bitcoin by restricting the blocksize limit. Since from their perspective an unrestricted Bitcoin would be more threatening, I could get into where the blockstream funding actually comes from. Then again maybe there are spyop agents on both sides of the debate, further inflaming and widening the gulf. Though I think it would be more productive to stick to the issues compared to pointlessly accuse each other of being double agents, that is just more ad hominen after all.

My argument stands on its own, if Core simply increased the blocksize limit to two megabytes it would reunite much of the community and Bitcoin would not be currently suffering from a congested network, which is currently causing transaction delays, increased fees and unreliability. This is not good for adoption, I understand that you think lighting network and sidechains should replace most Bitcoin transactions and that therefore we do not need to increase the blocksize limit. However I propose that we increase the blocksize limit now so that we do not need suffer from a congested network without actually having any layer two solutions ready, and then when the lighting network and sidechains are finally ready and deployed we can see whether people choose to move their activities off chain, or whether people prefer transacting on chain with all of the advantages and disadvantages that brings, or more likely something in between, then we will know whether we need to increase the blocksize limit again or not, instead of radically changing the fundamental design of Bitcoin now and betting the future of Bitcoin on what is essentially still vaporware.

I know you like to paint me as being an extremely unreasonable person, however what I am proposing here is very reasonable, most people outside of this field would recognize that the small blockist are taking an extreme and fundamentalist position. Most big blockist are applying pragmatic rationalism. Ideally I would just remove the blocksize limit completely or use an adaptive blocksize. However as a compromise we proposed the mechanism within Classic, for an increase to two megabytes, originally we went from 20MB to 8MB and finally to 2MB, and I could argue using Bitcoin Unlimited we could even agree to a 1.1MB blocksize limit. There has been zero compromise from the small block camp, after 18 months. There is not even a blocksize limit increase on the Core road map.

Which is why at this point we will just split Bitcoin, it is our right to maintain and continue the original Bitcoin blockchain as it was intended. We have the freedom and capability to do this, if the small blockist could just compromise a small amount this would not happen and they could avoid the split from happening at all, I know many of you fear the split. I have nothing to fear from it, at this point I see it as progress and an opportunity for further evolution. Bring on the intentional minority splits I say, let the chips fall and allow people to put their money where their mouth is, that way we will really see over the long term what people value more, at this point it could even be an alternative cryptocurrency that overtakes Bitcoin.