I'm possibly less a fan of governments 'educating' people on Bitcoin than most.  I prefer they concern themselves with 'important matters of state' or whatever else they waste the continuous flow of money and life that they suck out of their populations.

I like the term "cypher-space" over dark web.  Just saying.

I agree with the reasons, (lack of/creation of other options, and yes cost).  I am running fewer full nodes myself now than even two years ago.

One interesting quote there:
"The blocksize debate if anything substantially slowed the release, absorbing mindbogglingly enormous amounts of time, and also having avoid including some scaling tools to avoid people getting confused that sidechains themselves were a scaling answer."

In the process of trying to show how they are not a conflict of interest, he uses a conflict of interest (time devoted).
The thing is, he is right sidechains are only a factor in scaling, but they aren't the answer.  They do provide for some scaling, but not at all a full solution.

They waste a lot of time trying to claim that there isn't a conflict of interest.  The better method is to simply acknowledge it and move on.  People are fairly accepting of the risk for now, but their efforts to fight it and claim it doesn't exist both make them look foolish and waste their time.

I know, but it was still worth it.
Its a downward trend for years.  Whether/when it levels or begins increasing, and under what conditions will prove interesting.  Don't you think?

In the great Bitcoin experiment of ours...
It is increasingly likely that we will experience a scarcity market for transactions, at least for a time.
It will be some interesting data.
I doubt it will be the 'end of bitcoin', or whatever the rush to increase folks are worrying over.

Full node volume has declined from a high point of about 250K in 2011 to maybe less than 10K nodes?
With the only incentives for running a full node being non-economic, primarily informational or possibly security concerns, it will be interesting to see if that rate of decline stabilizes somewhere.

This is simultaneously the best feature of the proposal, and the one most likely to prevent it from becoming part of Bitcoin.

There was no such claim, implied or otherwise.
The coins are fundamentally different, but the similarity of this feature would have provided a good place to have started, if you had known of it.
Better late than never though.

One difference with the Monero model is that the amount of the fee is not a factor of the penalty, nor is size of the coinbase reward.  The penalty is not multiplied by the block reward.  Additive, not multiplicative.

I'd missed that detail at first pass because it seemed impossible for anyone to advocate such a function, when on its face it seems to fail the 'future-proof' test.  

Without knowing what the fees will be in the future, how can the penalty be the same for every transaction?  Fee amount tends to adjust with how much milk and bread a bitcoin can purchase.  The penalty may thus become overly burdensome (if bitcoin value increases) or meaningless (if it falls).
We can know the coinbase reward, but we should not always expect that to be 99% of the total as it is now.  This will matter later.

The advantage of the Monero multiplicative method is that it does not have to guess, it works at all fee levels, block rewards, valuation, etc.

By miner has to pay it, we mean "not paid to miner but to rollover pool instead"?  They miner is never paying anything, they are simply not given the reward, yes?

This begs the question.  It presupposes success.
When a fork occurs, you are on one side or the other at the time of the fork.

"If everyone's doing it" means that they have already done it, so there is no longer anything to be attractive to them.  It is an event, not a migration.  Unless you are imagining many many failed forks until one finally succeeds, which would be exceedingly chaotic.

I see your point in that the amount of the fees are not part of the calculation of the penalty.
However, why would anyone mine a block for which they will not be paid?  
The incentive would remain to move fees off chain, especially as the coinbase reward decreased.
Off-chain fees would not be subject to the seizure and redistribution of the rollover.
Better for the miner to guarantee positive revenue and get it on the side.

The devil is in the details, with no details, its all angels.

I suppose I would vote "NO" to most any change without knowing the details, but not "NO" to change itself.  I think Gavin is getting closer and closer to something that will make sense.  He is down to 8mb now, changed at a particular future block?

The goal is clear enough, and laudable.  It is the path to that goal that remains occluded.

Thanks for that, it was my reading also.
Thus TX fees that are not in the block but paid out of band are not subject to penalty...

Another difference, is that in the Monero method, the penalty can not reduce the block reward to below zero and make the block invalid.
There are many similarities, but also some important differences with the time tested Monero method and the current proposal.

Sure, there are quite a few edits that would be needed.
However, it has also been deployed and shown to work over time without pernicious economic effects. 

This is penalty then ONLY taken from the coinbase reward and not also TX fees?
How would this method survive the successive halvings (much less the eventual cessation)?

If it includes the TX fees (which likely it must), then to the extent that fees are off chain, they are not subject to the penalty.

OK, so its similar to Monero.
But there is a difference between this proposal and what Monero does that appears that it might need to be addressed.

The rollover pool creates an incentive for the miner to not use the fee pooling, and instead contract directly with the TX creators.
If implemented as written, this could become a problem.  Large TX creators and large miners would have an incentive to cartel because of the way this rollover pool works.

Monero avoids this problem, but most of the rest of this proposal has been implemented and running for quite a long time.  Its not new, or novel, except in ways that it is not as good.
An examination of the prior art is warranted.

Apparently, neither does Gavin.
He said he didn't want to talk to you until there was working code that does it?
Such code has been working for years, but people forget where the experimentation is occurring, the alts.
A good place to start:
https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/blob/54fbf2afb3bc029823ed6c200e08bd21fe42ac10/tests/unit_tests/block_reward.cp
and
https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/blob/c41d14b2aa3fc883d45299add1cbb8ebbe6c9ed8/src/cryptonote_core/blockchain.cpp#L2230-L2244

Can you explain a bit about the mechanism wherein the miner pays into the rollover pool, and why that is different from the 'original proposal'?  It is not obvious why this dictinction makes a difference.  It seems to still incentivize out of chain payments to miners for transaction inclusion regardless of whether it is paid by the miner, or deducted from the miner's reward, both are dependent on the fees in the block (which aren't there in out of block payments schemes).

Some of the privacy of Monero would be achievable using Bitcoin, but only if everyone changed their operational security methods.
JustusRanvier uses stealth addresses, which privacy would be further improved if he only transacted with others who also do this.  Ring signatures can also theoretically be accomplished albeit with some difficulty by using a client that could support this sort of key signing exchanges.

The problem for privacy remains, however, that since these are not a fundamental part of the protocol and a default for each transaction.  There are limits to the amount of privacy that can be obtained in the face of correlation analysis by a well funded reveal-er of such secrets.

Fundamentally, Gavin has assigned himself this problem.  He is diligently canvassing and curating opinions on the problems and methods of resolving them.
It can be frustrating work, but it is fully necessary.

He is getting a lot of help in this effort so it is not merely a contest of wills and personalities.  Also...Both Greg and Gavin are on the same team and not opposed, though their weighting of the priority of tasks may differ, so it is not really so much a matter of winner/loser.