Quote from: charmingfreddie on January 17, 2017, 08:10:33 PM

If bitcoin forks over block size it will be very bad for the entire community because it will scare merchants away. They will always wonder what will happen next but that looks like that is where we are headed sooner or later.

There are essentially no merchants to scare away. The grand total commerce done at the merchant level today is so close to zero you wouldn't believe it. If anything scares merchants is Bitcoin's .40c 'swipe fees'. Transaction fees are now way beyond levels tolerable for retail use. But G. Maxwell wants to eliminate retail/merchant uses and just make it a settlement network.

Fork - to start SegWit and fork to start LN. Those a really cool systems - go do your fucking fork. But leave Bitcoin alone. Bitcoin anticipated big blocks from the beginning. Put the blocksize limit at 8MB. Then, anyone like GMaxwell who gets a bright idea about starting a really cool cryptocurrency with a bunch of added features can just introduce that on a fork. Merchants won't care one bit. They might even love it and get on that fork.

G Maxwell uniquely believes he is entitled to start his altcoin on the bitcoin blockchain and all others should go do their forks somewhere else. G Maxwell thinks because he controls commit access, that he gets to decide what is right for bitcoin. SegWit and LN are altcoins. They don't belong on the main chain. 8MB is fully accounted for in the original version of Bitcoin.