Given the deadlock, I honestly start to think it might be good to do a 'divorce'. As in, we actually agree to disagree, and all see that there are fundamentally incompatible opinions with regards to the direction of Bitcoin. But we can keep it friendly.  This might be less damage/cost than having a hardfork battle solving it in January 2016.

That way we can avoid the fighting and truly let the market work out the rest. We divide up the common assets of the web sites, code repos etc. between Bitcoin/QT and Bitcoin/XT. Make it clear that Bitcoin is now two Bitcoins, and that the user has to decide.

QT and XT simply seem like two people who shouldn't be married. Better have a clean divorce than endless fighting.

Thoughts?

i said years ago that high tx costs, like we're starting to get now, will drive all these op_return companies away from Bitcoin.  and it will be the fault of guys like iCEBlow, tvbcof, & the BS core devs.  there will be repercussions:

The conflict of interest is a real concern, to be sure, but at this point I think it more likely that they are sincere. At least Greg, because he's always been a bit of a pessimist on Bitcoin scalability as a whole, being so code-focused, it really is quite consistent for him to side with Blockstream. Adam I suspect a bit more, since missing out on Bitcoin and all the financial gains despite having created part of it has to hurt, but I'm not at all willing to assume bad faith on his part either. At this point it's basically a social club for their point of view, and I do think the money influence will be corrupting as time wears on, but I'm skeptical that it's having a substantial effect yet. I

In any case, the main point is that it could be but we simply can't know. We can suspect, and it is probably good to needle them about it, but actually jumping to that conclusion as a decided fact doesn't seem helpful to me.

Or maybe it's just another trick whales are using to get the last weak hands to dump their BTC. This "attack" is just part of their schemes.

You people need to stop with the paranoia and the scare tactics. All this money is gonna end up flowing back into BTC in due times. Lots of people are going to end up holding the LTC, PPC and NMC bag.

Sorry, bro. This cannot be explained in the single forum post. The best I could do is give you a link to a philosophy book by Herbert Marcuse:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-Dimensional_Man

Essentially the thinking you espouse is a moral equivalent of:

a) football https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultras "What is the best football team and why Manchester United?"

b) post-communist intellectuals who consider Marxism the pinnacle of human thought
just substitute any of combination of {Marx,Engels,Lenin,Stalin,Mao,...} in place of Satoshi.

what comes first?  the code or the economic theory?  to me, it seems all the code monkeys trying to enforce Cripplecoin are just another play on the blockchain comes first theory where the coin is irrelevant.  this is also demonstrated by their incessant focus on decentralization of full nodes while ignoring users.  also demonstrated by their stubbornness in their position in spite of 75% support to inc block size over a number of polls.

they're wrong of course.  for those of us who've been around for a long time and have witnessed the evolution of the altcoin and Bitcoin 2.0 spaces, it should be obvious what comes first.  and that is, a bunch of geeks sit around a table and talk about what types of economic features should go into a coin to draw in as many investors and speculators as possible.  this happens FIRST.   then they go out and code it.  this comes SECOND.  this is what happened with Bitcoin as is clear in Satoshi's writings, the book of which i've read and studied for over 4.5 yrs now.  the code is merely used to enforce the economic precepts.

i see non tech ppl around here and on Reddit get intimidated by devs into thinking they don't know what they're talking about when they voice economic concerns about how core dev is being handled.  they are criticized and dismissed as if this is all about the tech.  i say BULLSHIT.  it's about a very important economic concept that's been around for thousands of years and that is SOUND MONEY.  it's bigger than all of us put together.  it's the human races first chance to have the most efficient form of sound money ever conceived of and created.  if we don't get this one right it could be another hundred years before we get another chance.  all the dev sounding bullshit we get from tvbcof, iCEBlow, gmax, kazukiPimp, MOA and TPTB is just about dev's gotta dev.  so don't let them intimidate you, non techies!

that's true.  but i converted from gold to Bitcoin precisely b/c i saw it as a SOV to replace gold that's had that role for thousands of years.  i'm not about to remain in a system that guarantees a rolling ponzi scheme every 5-6 yrs where i might get lucky the first migration but lose everything the second migration.  Bitcoiners should have the luxury of socking savings away in a cold wallet and forgetting about it maybe for the rest of their lives as they hand them down generation after generation.  b/c that is what it will take to really replace gold as digital gold.

we were told that the open source nature of the code would be able to adapt or mutate according to threats.  migration to another chain is the antithesis of that.

so important to demonstrate that it is indeed open source adaptable and resilient.  forks are not to be feared but to be encouraged in the proper situations.

I have been arguing that the law is inherently indeterminate, and further, that this may not be such a bad thing. I realize, however, that you may still not be convinced. Even if you are now willing to admit that the law is somewhat indeterminate, you probably believe that I have vastly exaggerated the degree to which this is true. After all, it is obvious that the law cannot be radically indeterminate. If this were the case, the law would be completely unpredictable. Judges hearing similar cases would render wildly divergent decisions. There would be no stability or uniformity in the law. But, as imperfect as the current legal system may be, this is clearly not the case.

The observation that the legal system is highly stable is, of course, correct, but it is a mistake to believe that this is because the law is determinate. The stability of the law derives not from any feature of the law itself, but from the overwhelming uniformity of ideological background among those empowered to make legal decisions. Consider who the judges are in this country. Typically, they are people from a solid middle- to upper-class background who performed well at an appropriately prestigious undergraduate institution; demonstrated the ability to engage in the type of analytical reasoning that is measured by the standardized Law School Admissions Test; passed through the crucible of law school, complete with its methodological and political indoctrination; and went on to high-profile careers as attorneys, probably with a prestigious Wall Street-style law firm. To have been appointed to the bench, it is virtually certain that they were both politically moderate and well-connected, and, until recently, white males of the correct ethnic and religious pedigree. It should be clear that, culturally speaking, such a group will tend to be quite homogeneous, sharing a great many moral, spiritual, and political beliefs and values. Given this, it can hardly be surprising that there will be a high degree of agreement among judges as to how cases ought to be decided. But this agreement is due to the common set of normative presuppositions the judges share, not some immanent, objective meaning that exists within the rules of law.

In fact, however, the law is not truly stable, since it is continually, if slowly, evolving in response to changing social mores and conditions. This evolution occurs because each new generation of judges brings with it its own set of "progressive" normative assumptions. As the older generation passes from the scene, these assumptions come to be shared by an ever-increasing percentage of the judiciary. Eventually, they become the consensus of opinion among judicial decisionmakers, and the law changes to reflect them. Thus, a generation of judges that regarded "separate but equal" as a perfectly legitimate interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment gave way to one which interpreted that clause as prohibiting virtually all governmental actions that classify individuals by race, which, in turn, gave way to one which interpreted the same language to permit "benign" racial classifications designed to advance the social status of minority groups. In this way, as the moral and political values conventionally accepted by society change over time, so too do those embedded in the law.

The law appears to be stable because of the slowness with which it evolves. But the slow pace of legal development is not due to any inherent characteristic of the law itself. Logically speaking, any conclusion, however radical, is derivable from the rules of law. It is simply that, even between generations, the range of ideological opinion represented on the bench is so narrow that anything more than incremental departures from conventional wisdom and morality will not be respected within the profession. Such decisions are virtually certain to be overturned on appeal, and thus, are rarely even rendered in the first instance.

Confirming evidence for this thesis can be found in our contemporary judicial history. Over the past quarter-century, the "diversity" movement has produced a bar, and concomitantly a bench, somewhat more open to people of different racial, sexual, ethnic, and socio-economic backgrounds. To some extent, this movement has produced a judiciary that represents a broader range of ideological viewpoints than has been the case in the past. Over the same time period, we have seen an accelerated rate of legal change. Today, long-standing precedents are more freely overruled, novel theories of liability are more frequently accepted by the courts, and different courts hand down different, and seemingly irreconcilable, decisions more often. In addition, it is worth noting that recently, the chief complaint about the legal system seems to concern the degree to which it has become "politicized." This suggests that as the ideological solidarity of the judiciary breaks down, so too does the predictability of legal decisionmaking, and hence, the stability of the law. Regardless of this trend, I hope it is now apparent that to assume that the law is stable because it is determinate is to reverse cause and effect. Rather, it is because the law is basically stable that it appears to be determinate. It is not rule of law that gives us a stable legal system; it is the stability of the culturally shared values of the judiciary that gives rise to and supports the myth of the rule of law.

if i have to migrate to a new chain and lose money doing it, i'm done with  crypto.

Or use an altcoin that doesn't fetishize 1MB blocks and pay $0.01. Bitcoin can't afford to be ultra-conservative in the face of endless altcoin competition. It must take calculated risks or be overtaken.

Yes people will stop using Bitcoin b/c they have to pay $0.5 per transaction. They rather use bank and will pay $20.

Yes, but the ongoing spam shows clearly that all full nodes are handling the traffic just fine. We were told that they would crash and burn from overloaded memory. Not true.

i hate to bring up an analogy from medicine since it may not be appropriate but i'll try nonetheless.

one of the greatest things i learned during my internship btwn med school and residency in eyes, is that too much intervention can cause problems for patients.  every 3 mo i'd rotate onto a new ward with responsibilities for about a couple of dozen gorked out patients.  i say gorked out b/c invariably all of them had at least a dozen meds onboard for a variety of reasons most of which had to do with sedation, pain, or anti-anxiety.  problem was, these meds unbeknownst to their previous physicians were preventing these ppl from getting better.  this was a repeating problem.  so the first thing i would do would be to cocentrate on stripping off as many of these unnecessary meds as possible.  much to everyone's amazement, these pts would perk up, turn around and start walking again, interacting with staff, feeling better, be more alert, and generally just get better to the pt i could discharge them.  and this experience happened over and over for me.  twas a great personal accomplishment for me and one i will never forget; don't over do it.

pt being, i still think the block size cap is the fundamental problem here.  more rules and limits that core dev piles on simply complicates the code and makes it more complex.  if anything, we should be stripping off rules and limits so that the free mkt can come to bear on many of these problems we are currently seeing.  the miners and users are perfectly capable of regulating the size of blocks and fees on their own.  if we lift the cap, the spam can actually help the network.  as long as spammers have to pay fees any spam attempts will line the pockets of miners and go back to growing the hashrate.  that would be a good thing and the last thing the spammers want to do.  no doubt they will try at first so we should expect even greater higher level attacks initially but in the long run, they will die off.  that's b/c their real objective is to disrupt new user growth which w/o a cap will be short circuited.  any further spam then will just help the tx mkt to grow, miners to profit, and yes, full nodes will eventually develop their own fee mkt too.  yes, full node capacities will have to grow but that should be viewed as a good thing b/c on the other end that will mean that miners are prospering (which is ok Greg) and user growth will be skyrocketing along with the price.  more merchants will come on board with new user growth and they will want and probably have a fiduciary responsibility to run their own full nodes which will add to network capacity.

so strip off rules and limits within reason, not add, and let BitcoinRun!

Is he right or wrong about that?

Via what methodology would we test that hypothesis before arriving at a conclusion about its validity?

China threatening short sellers.  Shades of US back in 2008.  the volatility back then makes Bitcoin look like cake:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-07-09/china-soars-most-2009-after-government-threatens-sellers-arrest-global-stocks-surge

i don't think it really matters, does it?
since most of the mined blocks are filled with real demand trying to get into blocks with or without spamming,