Even if there is no block space limitation in software, the bandwidth limit would still limit the amount of transactions that can be included in a block

For example, if I include only 100 transactions, I can include all of them for free since they don't add too much latency. But if I include 10000 transactions then my block will be orphaned all the time. So if all the miners will mine small blocks which only include 100 transactions, the transaction fee can be at 0 forever. Then you will have more and more transactions piled up in the mempool, and some of them would like to add some more fee to incentivize miners to include them

So when the fee rise to 0.03 btc per transaction,  a miner would possibly include 8000 transactions and have only 1 out of 10 mined blocks entering the blockchain (rest all being orphaned), since if he succeeded the mined block will bring him 265 bitcoins in one single block

But there is a risk, if his block get orphaned almost all the time, then all those 8000 transactions would be included by other miners with smaller blocks, e.g. 2000 transactions per block, and he can not be sure there will be endless transactions with high fee. So I guess miners would not do that kind of high risk blocks

Still, no matter how high the fee is, the amount of transaction a miner can maximum process is limited by the whole network speed (or a software block size limit), so you eventually will have more and more transaction queued up in the mempool without any hope of being included, unless the internet infrastructure had a large degree of upgrade all over the world

Just only 2 rules for participants:

1. Buy some coin and hold at least 4 years (until next reward halving)
2. Start to sell 10% of those coin each year

Then they will at least double the investment in 4 years and beyond

Of course, there will always be people don't follow this recommendation, for example when they saw their coin have doubled in value, they would immediately cash out every coin, thus cause a small crash of the price, but then if they want to enjoy this return year over year, decades over decades, they would eventually need to buy it back at some stage, and maybe they sold it too early, or too late, and have to buy it back at higher exchange rate later... Market timing is very difficult, so why don't follow the rule and get a secured investment return instead of against the rule? Furthermore, when lots of people are acting against the rule, they destroy the anticipated supply demand relation, and might get the price to crash hard, what is the benefit of that?

I am more interested seeing that some pension funds allow people to select bitcoin as one of their investment option. Those useless bank issued funds, mostly just bring loss over time, and fund manager took a big cut in fee

Noway this will make it an alt-coin

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Prohibited_changes

In fact I'm surprised when Pieter promote this soft fork trick. It is cunning and stealthy, not a formal way to implement change, it is very like trying to find the security hole in core software and exploit to reach hacker's desire: Let's see is there any more things that we can do without being discovered by old core clients

In fact if you are a honest dev, you should immediately take measures to patch such kind of security weakness, not exploit it

Currently my biggest confusion is why Gmaxwell quit as main committer, and who will be the next?  

Ok then you can expect the same thing in 2016, now it is even more well-known

Unlike other open-source project, bitcoin is money, everything happens here have direct economy impact, so it is suicide to do a hard fork without major consensus, since that is simply Mutually Assured Destruction - MAD

Imagine that Blockstream devs and chinese exchanges formed an alliance of no block size increase, while Gavin and western exchanges formed an alliance of BIP101. The moment following a hard fork, all pre-fork coins can be spent on both chain. So chinese miners will dump all their pre-fork coins on Bitstamp/Coinbase (which will be running XT by that time), and western miners will dump their pre-fork coins on BTCC/OKCOIN.

It seems the money supply only increased by 100% following a hard fork, but currently only less than 10% of the coins are in circulation, over 90% of them are hoarded as long term storage. Daily net sell volume on all exchanges combined is estimated to be around 5000-10000 coins. But after a hard fork, those hoarders suddenly get a double of their coins over night, so they will immediately sell their coins on the chain that they don't support. Putin said: "when a fight is inevitable, you hit first"

Then exchanges will face a sell volume counted in millions of coins, 1000x larger than the daily sell pressure, this will quickly send bitcoin value back to cents or in case of lack of liquidity, zero. And game over

Then investor confidence for bitcoin is all gone, no one will talk about it in years, and banks all laugh about the miserable fate of decentralized currency. And even if you managed to pull up another coin which prohibiting any hard fork to core protocol, it might still never succeed because the public image of cryptocurrency is totally destroyed, it will become the biggest scam in human history (instead of fiat money )

Anyone with a little bit literacy will understand this scenario, so let's hope it will never happen. However, if bitcoin succeeded and start to threaten banks, they would really like to see this happen. So any attempt to divide the core devs and trying to persuade some major exchange to use different forked versions can be regarded as highly malicious. And I doubt those exchanges really fully understand this yet, otherwise Bitstamp would never claim to support XT

Politicians can not legislate the value of PI because it is a simple fact that almost anyone can verify. However, when it comes to if time space travel is possible given relative theory or the cat is dead or not before you open the box, we really enter the technical politics world: When a knowledge becomes  so complex that only a few understand (and no one can prove that they really understand), politics will take over

So it is very important to keep to the simplest solution that gains majority of understanding. A brilliant solution without understanding will just be trashed by the majority, unless you find a way to bribe the majority to accept your solution, and that become politics

This kind of knowledge and time barrier even exists in core devs: None of the core devs have enough time to thoroughly understand a complex proposal by another core dev, so they just go ahead and promote an even more complex solution which no one will understand, and polish it with lots of end user benefits

Remember that Swiss central bank suddenly cut its peg with Euro this spring? They know they really don't have so many things corresponding to their money

Anyway the backing is the least to worry, none of the currency's value is decided by a country's economy, it is all decided at exchange by that country's central bank with their foreign  currency reserve. And to protect the exchange rate, you need to have lots of foreign currency reserve. Soros could wipe out small country's currency like Thailand and Malaysia, even Sweden, but he was defeated at HongKong, simply because huge amount of USD reserve of China

And when someone attacking bitcoin's exchange rate, the currency reserve of all the bitcoin users are stand to protect its value

The biggest problem it solves is saving. Fiat money obviously can not do that due to the inflative mandate of all central banks. Before, no one really save in an inflative monetary policy, they all take loans instead. But now new generations realized that no one need to work because the over production of almost everything, so they plan for early retirement instead, so saving becomes a new trend among young people

You get TV from Japan and Korea, cars from Germany, Computer from US, Airbus from France, get almost everything else cheaply from china, but Switzerland? A couple of clocks filled with diamonds selling for millions, not interested for majority of the new generation except people who have nowhere to throw their money

The centralization of the knowledge is the problem here, if everyone could easily understand what is going on then there will be no problem, so it is extremely important to keep the solution easy to understand for majority of users, e.g. decentralize the knowledge. And from this point of view, 2MB block is the most viable solution that can be understood by majority of users

Because it's money, people will lose their mind and become animals when money is involved 

This is very bad, bitcoin is created to prevent such kind of political disasters but unfortunately because core devs holds too much political power in deciding bitcoin's direction, the same thing happened exactly as a political fight in large enterprises: A faction with enough political expertise can use very ugly skill to make their opponents give up. In fact these core devs are the biggest target that can be compromised and the single point of failure of bitcoin, we should limit as much as possible the power from them but curretly there is no mechanism

Now only Wladimir is holding ground, he will be the next target to be compromised. I think the worst case scenario is that no consensus at all will be reached among core devs and bitcoin keeps as it is today forever, all the scaling solutions goes to offchain but that does not really matter for most of the IT illiterate people

True, in the past, people from the ruling class decided what should be used as currency, majority of users had no choice (Even today they still don't have a choice, they just want something secure and trustworthy (and simple), and of course the one that is backed by the power of government/central bank is most trustworthy). So I think gold was not a selection of average people's free will, but the will of the ruling class (They need gold to decorate their house, so there is always a demand from them to support the value of this kind of commodity)

The speed of light limitation will make it impossible to run between Earth and Mars, so you still need interplanet exchanges for crypto currencies but how would that work with the speed of light limitation in place is still a question, maybe in interplanet exchanges the confirmation time must increase to one  hours or longer. It seems only a quantum coin can do instant information propagation in universe (in science fiction like theory)

It is a payment system variable, but payment system is only a small component in a monetary system, thus the priority is much lower than the monetary system's integrity and security. If you get a transaction capacity problem, you talk to paypal, not Federal Reserve

The monetary rule is only FED's tool, their major task is maintain market confidence. I think core devs should also prioritize that,  as they are the one that can affect the market confidence of bitcoin ecosystem

If you want bitcoin network to become the world's most trustworthy money with predefined money supply schedule, responsible for money distribution to other institutions, then nothing needs to be done: The Fedwire system that handles large transactions between Federal reserve and thousands of member banks in US do 4 tps, and bitcoin can do that today

If you want bitcoin to become a paypal like system that handles high frequency trading between billions of private people, then it is an e-commerce system. Its capacity is heavily limited by the CPU speed and network bandwidth (not block size limit), due to the nature of P2P network (exponentially rising data traffic and lag with more and more nodes).

Of course it will be good that bitcoin can both be a secure monetary system while still be able to serve billions of users at protocol level, but if you can not get both, which one do you prioritize? I think it is a huge waste of resource to use thousands of nodes on a P2P network to make sure a coffee transaction is tamper resistant 

It is backed by Atlantis at least

In fact Yen is not backed by Japanese central bank, just printed by. You bring your Yen to Japanese central bank, you can only get Yen back nothing else. Only the merchant in Japan can give you something useful in exchange of Yen

But you could further look into the example of Swiss franc: If you bring billions of Swiss franc to Switzerland, you really can not get a lot of things there, that is a small country with limited physical goods and services, however many billionaires store their wealth into Switzerland just because its secret banking service

Either chinese exchanges pump and dump, or capital fleeing china, or both

Imagine that you have a secret Swiss bank account, will you use those Swiss franc to buy coffee in china?

The easiest way is always use domestic fiat money to buy coffee, only an exchange will suffice that, just like those Forex exchange desks in airport/train station. I really think those forex desks  should add bitcoin conversion in their service, but currently localbitcoins is enough