If you use limit order on exchanges, you can even make some money when you do such conversion. This is especially true when you are a dealer on localbitcoins, you will gain 2-3% at least on both ends   

After those who complain about the high fee left, the bitcoin network will be as good as before, so eventually all the poor people leave for alt-coins and rich people stay at bitcoin, which coin will be more valuable? 

The effect of inflation is added money supply, e.g. same amount of capital investment must go to different coins, thus each coin ends up worth less. And just because of this, people would not throw their investment on multiple coins

The limit I see with BU's market driven block size is that it supposes that every market participant is so poor that they have to be a rational economist. In fact the richer you are, the less you care about efficiency and profit, and you start to care about those higher level concerns

For example, the BU suggests that miners are willing to take a larger block when the fee is enough high to compensate for the orphaning risk. As a result, we would have many orphaned large blocks chasing for 50+ btc fee in each block. And transactions will often take longer time to confirm even if you paid lots of fee. This is the result of trying to squeeze every juice from the blockspace resource, an environmental hazzard

In comparison, if we have super fast block propagation and extremely low orphan rate, the network is much more healthy, and the value for this can not be measured by market, it is an environmental bonus on every user of the entire ecosystem

Isn't this kind of babysitting habit created such conflict in core devs? Why don't first make some poll to see what majority of the customers really want from bitcoin, and if they can not have everything, what is their priority

Miners only care about the block subsidy and low orphan rate
Investors even care less about payment function since they hold large sum for long term and use exchange to liquidate
Exchanges and payment processors are the one require large transaction capacity

If you accept bitcoin then you have only 21 million bitcoin, then if you add litecoin too then you have another 84 million LTC, then if you accept another cryptocurrency then you have another xxx million of coins. All these extra coins are inflation in cryptocurrency world, and since you don't want inflation, you will only focus on one most popular coin with limited total supply, that's bitcoin

I also tried mining Litecoin, got scammed by pools, so the other cryptocurrencies are highly risky and immature

These are interesting statements, now replace your oyster shells to cyberspace cubes. These cyberspace cubes are value containers, they can contain enormous amount of value, and the value inside those cubes keeps growing every year. When you want to spend, you only need to locate your nearest local dealer to exchange value streams in those cubes to your local currency. Feel the difference?  

You are dig into details here, we only talk about those model names at design level. At decision making level what matters is feedback from your customer. If you can't keep them happy, they go to another supplier and you are done

I have roughly analyzed the political power map HERE, it is the miners, exchanges and investors the biggest customer for bitcoin, and they hold veto power to a solution, similar to a large customer can write you off from their supplier list. So we should listen to their feedback before writing any design specification

Just wonder, if every week there are 100 new solutions, who has the time to review? Shouldn't the new solution based on current major user feedback instead of wishful thinking? Need a spam filter for new solutions  

Each company have their own process, in the project I participated (100 to 1000+ developers) this is a common practice

Of course bitcoin is decentralized network without a centralized decision making model. But just because it is decentralized, it is more important to have a per-agreed process in change management. You can code whatever you want, people just ignore. From the amount of discussion I see on reddit and forum, the reaction for SW is even less than XT

Any investment involves risk, there are so many technical and political uncertainty in bitcoin. But I think by now most of the agile investors already hold bitcoin

Theoretically, bitcoin is destined to double in value every 4 years due to lower and lower new coin supply each year. And if you consider the fact that fiat money just get more and more, and user base is going to grow, this performance is guaranteed

If the value doubles every 4 years, and block subsidy cut by half every 4 years, the fiat income for miners will not change. However, due to newer and newer mining technology, the difficulty raise caused by mining competition will dwarf the effect of reward halving (reward having have the same effect as difficulty doubling, which can happen in a couple of months when a new generation of chips come on line). And we all know that difficulty increase does not impact the fee, but raise the coin value

Exactly the reason I'm against using soft fork to sneak in changes, such kind of practice is hacking the network, not the formal R&D process of  "user feedback -> design specification -> implementation"

The problem with smart contract is that you can not enforce it if there is a default, these kind of contract have no legal status, thus only suitable for internal use only

The blockchain only transfer ownership of a string of data, the value of these data can be given by market (In bitcoin's case it is exchanges). But a smart contract's value is decided by the value of its underlying property, not market. Because you must be able to enforce a take over of property in case of default, it requires smart contract have legal status. Currently it does not have legal status, thus it worth nothing

Fiat money was born with a permanent weakness that it can not be used to store value long term wise. Bitcoin is exactly the opposite, so they tends to compensate each other in different function area: Fiat money for spending and bitcoin for saving

I would still take the normal measure to buy a house, e.g. taking a fiat loan to buy house and pay interest by selling 5-10% bitcoins once or twice a year to pay those interests and mortgages. Since bitcoin appreciate at least 10% per year, so you end up with a house and roughly same value of bitcoins 10 years later

Currently bitcoin perfectly cover the biggest shortcoming of fiat money that it can not be used as a long term saving medium, due to all the inflative monetary policy from central banks

The inflative monetary policy will never change because that's how central banks drive the economy. If they stopped printing money then the whole economy will drop into recession

I think bitcoin should focus on those things that fiat money CAN NOT do, not those things fiat money already do

I've been registered at Abra for a long time but it seems there is no progress

I guess most of them do not have enough skill to "go to exchanges -> purchase some bitcoin -> send them to another exchange in another country -> sell them for local currency". I have tried to teach one friend to transfer the fund from another country (she is a 37 years old professor) when she visited me, she said there is so much hassle and she will never do it again, she does not care about the expensive bank fee, she just want fast and easy process of use her credit card

So even bitcoin were used in remittance, it will be some large companies utilizing bitcoin and the end user would only notice the speed and fee advantage. However, if it is operated by large companies, then they are operating more or less like Western Union, have frequent clearing and settlement and do not need blockchain for more than one transaction per hour

I think the reason that some people spend their bitcoins is because they are monetarily illiterate, sooner or later they will realize that spending deflative bitcoin is much worse than spending inflative fiat money, so the end result will be that they would still spend fiat money, unless there is a total crash of fiat money

And politically it is also decent that bitcoin do not clash with fiat money at payment space. Being a value storage is much better than trying to replace the fiat money, which will cause nation wide or world wide sanction from established power. Anyway, it is very easy to limit bitcoin at ISP level, especially when a block become so huge

Totally agree, and another very useful function is saving, since fiat money is already useless for long term saving

There are hundreds of fast and cheap payment method in today's financial world, adding one more bitcoin does not make any difference for coffee purchase (even worse since you have to convert to bitcoin first). But there is not even one single fiat money that is not inflationary, so saving is the most obvious reason people come to bitcoin

I think most of the bitcoiners are driven by such a thought: "I get some bitcoin now and after some years I start to spend it. By that time, fiat money has already inflated so much that my bitcoin value will rise at least several times"

And when the time has come for spending, they realized that they better spend fiat money since those are inflative and widely accepted domestically, so they only sell a little bit bitcoin on exchanges to get fiat money to spend

Being able to directly do person to person transaction on blockchain is cool, but it is just cool, no any real usage strongly demand such kind of functionality, since people will always spend fiat money first, so their interface at both end would still be exchanges. Even when you do international remittance, you have to convert from/to fiat money at both end

Imagine an extreme case: During 2016 bitcoin value rise another 10 times, all the blocks are full at 2MB. Average people can not do transactions due to the fee is now $10 per transaction (So that only $1000+ transactions are reasonably cheap). Would people leave bitcoin? Definitely not, they will do exactly like today's pooled mining, rely on large institutions to do transaction for them cheap and fast

Similar to people not complaining when banks are closed during weekends, they will always find a way when bitcoin's blockchain transaction capacity is not enough, but they won't give up on bitcoin, just like they won't give up on gold even it has terrible transaction capability