My thoughts...
We know that several great solutions have been proposed and we can all agree that the lack of governance or notion of leadership has been the bane of development of bitcoin in recent times.
Bitcoin represented an innovative, disruptive technology and industry. However, the first people to lay hold on it were the miners.
As such, unlike later cryptocurrencies, the miners have more to do with any change than the user "community".
This is understandable - given the scape: several of these miners invented in the very first ASICS and mining farms.
At the back of most people's minds is profit, the miners especially.
The status quo greatly benefits the larger miners.
So anything that tends to reduce their profit, the importance of their farms, or investments made so far is greatly resisted by many of them.
At the same time, the ordinary users are trying to prevent centralisation, explosion (in size) of the blockchain, and disproportionate increase in fees (in the short run, at least).
The developers are just custodians of technical jargon, from my view point - that is!
OK.. what we need now is a solution that pleases everybody!
One that does not change the:
- block time
- difficulty algorithm
- protocol (in any disruptive way)
- block size (the solution must not hinge on a block size change).
Any ideas?
Status quo does not greatly benefit the larger miners. This is a commonly spoken fallacy so I need to correct it. Miners want more transaction capability so the network can continue to grow. More transactions means more fees and mass adoption of bitcoin. Bitcoin growth stopped when all of the blocks became full over a year ago. Fees went up, but miners' revenue is still mostly from block rewards. Now bitcoin is less than half of total cryptocurrency market cap. And still people try to push the Segfault solution which is dead in the water.
I think bitcoin will remain status quo and have stopped putting energy into arguing for a sane fix for it. I'm all in on altcoins, and if bitcoin dies a slow death I won't be too upset. If it keeps chugging along as "digital gold" or whatever, I'm fine with that too. The most important concepts of bitcoin have been proven. It has been an amazing experiment.
Bitcoin's artificial transaction limit is only one of its problems. The difficulty adjustment is broken, the total denomination is too low, the POW will be susceptible to attacks in 10 years, too many corporations are spying on the transactions, the dev team is bought off by corporations, and the mining is too centralized. Nonetheless, it's still brilliant, and a testament that humans can change "the system" without permission!
