Of course the cost, reliability and user experience do not affect adoption. Many people come to bitcoin just to contribute resource, not asking for service, because this is a trustworthy monetary system. Being service minded are typically cheap mindset from entrepreneurs

The fact is that people in bitcoin community (mostly libertarian type) will never listen to someone else unless they see it with their own eyes. And even if they face a problem, they will tends to use their own solution instead of others, there are many ways to solve a problem without touch the bitcoin protocol

Here is another thread showing that this kind of discussion is just fruitless
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3yyvmp/they_think_satoshi_was_wrong/

If the way of discussion is always trying to disagree and against, then consensus is not possible. But the good thing with bitcoin is that if you don't have consensus, you are not going anywhere

If fee/transaction indeed become a problem (which I highly doubt it will, since statistics showing that majority of users are not fee/transaction sensitive), then the corresponding consensus is going to rise, but currently there is none

The world is not lacking of cheap and fast transaction method, but it lacks one monetary system with honest money creation, that is the major advantage of bitcoin

So you are mining on a non-BU pool and promoting BU, and constantly quote Satoshi's words while at the same time say to let market decide for itself ...

As explained many times, the decision making mechanism in bitcoin community is not democracy, it is consensus. Only the super majority consensus get passed, other attempts to fork will always fade away. When no consensus can be reached, the system keeps going on at its current status

So you are mining in a BU mining pool? Which one is that?

Today's way of mining, as a core dev pointed out, is a historical mistake that became popular. If they had advertised p2pool from the beginning, then pooled mining might not look like it is today

In earlier version of bitcoin, every miner is running a full node and use CPU to mine, that is the ideal configuration for a decentralized network, because there is no concentration of hash power

However with the rise of dedicated mining software and hardware, the mining start to concentrate at a handful of large pools, this dramatically increased the degree of centralization, because a few large pool can use miner's hash power to change the network without their awareness (2013 hard fork demonstrated god-like power from pools: BTCGUILD and Slush pool rolled back the fork with their hash power, most of their miners did not even know what happened)

P2Pool is painful to setup and run, but if you think long term wise, the future bitcoin mining should ideally all be done through P2POOL or similar way, thus totally eliminate the risk of large mining pools colluding to threaten the network. More importantly, if every miner need to run a full node, then the miner will be very aware of the impact of all the protocol change, thus become more involved in the protocol related discussion

Let's compare the cost for 4MB blocks:

1. You spend several hundred dollars on hardware and make a new node dedicated to bitcoin (many gaming machines do not support 16GB memory, thus you need to upgrade pretty much the whole machine), in hope of maintaining the $0.05 fee for bitcoin transactions (and it requires thousands of other nodes also do the same as you)

2. You use those several hundred dollars to pay the transaction fee (should be enough for at least one hundred transactions even the fee rose 100x to $5 per transaction)

Notice that setting up a full node does not benefit the node operator in anyway, and raise the block size will require thousands of such voluntarily setup nodes to upgrade. So I guess any rational human would refuse the node upgrade and pay the fee instead. I guess even the fee has risen to a prohibitive level, average user would still pay fee instead of setting up full nodes using dedicated hardware

Jeff and Gavin's statement recently:

"However, in the short term, we have a disappointing situation where a subset of dev consensus is disconnected from the oft-mentioned desire to increase block size on the part of users, businesses, exchanges and miners. This reshapes bitcoin in ways full of philosophical and economic conflicts of interest. "

I'm more interested in the philosophical conflicts of interest here, unfortunately they did not mention what are they. I believe bitcoin's long term success will depends on its core philosophy

For example, everyone without permission can set up a full node and start to mine bitcoins (p2pool), thus become a part of a decentralized global banking system. It is this free of entry all the way into money creation attracted so many enthusiasts. So I think permission-less is the core philosophy of bitcoin

Following this philosophy, if you have too high barrier of entry (too high requirement on hardware and mining investment for individuals), then it is not a permission-less system any more

Similarly, everyone should be able to use the blockchain to do transactions without permission

So that is the conflict of interest here: If you want every one can setup a full node at home and mine bitcoins, then you should keep the block size small, thus not everyone will be able to use the blockchain to do transactions. There should be a balance between these two considerations

I just had another idea: If you setup a full node, then you can do transactions cheaply. Easy to explain, difficult to implement  

It does not help if you don't have servers at major internet backbones. And if you have, those servers will be censored in a similar way

Bitfury's paper here:

http://bitfury.com/content/4-white-papers-research/block-size-1.1.1.pdf

"The table contains an estimate of how many full nodes would no longer function without hard-ware upgrades as average block size is increased. These estimates are based on the assumption that many users run full nodes on consumer-grade hardware, whether on personal computers or in the
cloud. Characteristics of node hardware are based on a survey performed by Steam [19]; we assume PC gamers and Bitcoin enthusiasts have a similar amount of resources dedicated to their hardware.

The exception is RAM: we assume that a typical computer supporting a node has no less than 3 GB RAM as a node requires at least 2GB RAM to run with margin[15]. For example,if block size increases to 2 MB, a node would need to dedicate 8 GB RAM to the Bitcoin client, while more than a half of PCs
in the survey have less RAM."

Based on his estimation, raise the block size to 4MB will drop 75% of nodes from the network

Not when you are already heavily dependent on that one, you can not come up with a solution overnight

As I understand, Matt Corallo's bitcoin relay network is a private company, similar "a phone call to shut it down" risk

I don't remember exactly, but just google it, and also another statistic by Mark in Montreal conference showing that even a 1MB block can take over 30s to verify on a mining node

From the beginning the block size limit works as a spam filter (even this year it successfully resisted the spam attack by coinwallet.eu during July and September). And now people realized it also can work as a means to prevent centralization (As long as blocks are small, average people with a little bit IT knowledge can run a full node in his home thus increase the level of decentralization)

This has nothing to do with transaction capacity, but a live or death question. If the blocks are huge and average people can not run a node, thus they all run on large data centers, then a couple of phone call to ISP could disable the bitcoin network. By making blocks small and portable, you can run it on almost any device thus it becomes unlikely you can disable bitcoin network unless you shutdown the whole internet

Mining nodes on the other hand can not be run by average home users, Satoshi also anticipated certain degree of mining centralization. This is also a potential risk but not a live and death problem

So, as long as average home users can run a full node, the block size is not the problem. But simulation by bitfury already indicated that we will have a severe performance problem with 4MB blocks on average home computer, so currently the only safe choice is 2MB, not 8MB promoted by XT

IMO, the biggest difficulty for SW to be adopted is its complexity


Ok it is very easy to write the code and implement it, but to convince the users to use your client is totally another story. Since SW is so difficult to explain, majority of users without enough time to dig into the slides and codes for weeks will just ignore it and take the simple approach of raise the block to 2MB

If you are operating a million dollar worth of mining farms, are you going to risk your investments on a set of not-time-tested new architecture which even the author have difficulty to explain to you how it works?

Are you indicating that they all have the same boss and this is just a show?  

If a developer works for an enterprise, then it is very difficult for his proposal to be accepted by the community, no matter how brilliant it is. We all know that you can not work for an enterprise without listen to your boss. A developer from an enterprise only represent that enterprise's interest, and bitcoin is designed to be free from censorship, including the code level censorship from enterprises

Another reason that enterprises are not suitable to make development decisions for bitcoin is because their limited view. In today's society, it is the monetary system set the game rules and enterprises are just game players. They do not have the overview like central bankers, this makes their decision short sighted

If you are designing a global monetary system, then you better not listen to those who only knows how to make money, your view should be higher than those central bankers around the world, and it requires much higher level of understanding in money, human and society. And these are all areas with almost non existing knowledge, since only a handful of human can reach such a position that require him to master these topics

However some enterprises hold some power in deciding bitcoin main chain's direction, and the possibility of two parallel existing fork is almost 0, so the future of bitcoin is still quite uncertain

I think it worth the effort for all the participants to study some basics about money, human and society and decide a set of constitution-like rules to guide all the enterprises in bitcoin space. So far the only clear guidance is limited total supply. SW already gave an example that you can change bitcoin's architecture by using a soft fork, but should that still be called bitcoin?

What makes bitcoin bitcoin?

What you said is very true, bitcoin's open source nature is its biggest advantage

However, when the protocol become 1 million + lines, I guess your trust is not so easy to establish if you try to inspect the code by yourself, you start to rely on other more involved devs

This is especially the case for most of the users without IT expertise, they just blindly download a wallet recommended by bitcoin.org and never question the validity of those clients, and they blindly upgrade to the latest version without reading the change log

Full nodes are more careful in selecting software, but still I doubt that those node operator really go to Git and read the source when they apply an upgrade. Typically they just read change log, and even if they do not fully understand a change's details, they still applies it based on the "Claimed" higher performance, stronger security, or newer feature etc... e.g. they put all their trust on core devs, believing that they will not screw it (And that's the reason we had 2013 hard fork incident)

Unfortunately currently the split in the core devs started to change all that trust. But then the question is: If you can not trust core devs, who can you trust?

It's just a way for government to hire people and give them job, because they can print limitless money

Producing consumable goods is already over-saturated by large enterprises. I think faster and safer travel service is more interesting, and medical research to cure cancer is also worth looking

Show your Ferrari 

I still think any devs that have commit access should at least own 10000 bitcoins to make sure they can do R&D independently. Having large enterprise backing is politically disadvantage in a decentralized system, it reduces the trust

The reason we end up here is because there was not enough incentive for the core devs. I still remember during mining frenzy, many miners were donating bitcoins to mining software designer and even mining rig designer.  But for core devs? Almost none from average user, so that vacuum is spotted by enterprises quickly. First Gavin went to TBF, and then several others into Blockstream. We could avoid this if there is a mechanism to incentivize core devs

Judging from trading volume, large Chinese whales tried to push up, but faced enormous resistance, I think they will start a new round of consolidation before the coins are more in firm hands

It is too easy to make a 50% profit in a couple of months, many mid-term speculators will just sell

It is interesting to see that Jeff is now teaming up with Gavin, what is happening inside the core devs? It seems the situation suddenly get weird after the HK conference

http://www.coindesk.com/blockstream-21-million-seed-capital/ Linkedin, Airbnb, Google, Yahoo ... many of the software heavy weights are backing blockstream, no doubt there are so much slides from that direction, they have been preparing for over one year with all these solutions

However the solutions from blockstream are all complex. Raised level of complexity will dramatically reduce its ability to survival long term wise, and the acceptance from miners/users will be very low

I think at these stage any more talk is meaningless, let the predictive market decide which fork will survive. Satoshi's one million coin can destroy any fork he does not like, so I think any design that is against Satoshi's original vision have a high risk of failure. Of course he might not react, but then independent core devs also hold lots of coins (Rich guys don't need a boss) that can be mass dumped, let the star wars begin