There's a very short list of people that matter in development. They will figure out what's best for us. We really have no say anyway.
Wait, what? I can't tell if I'm reading that wrong somehow or if it's sarcasm, because I normally find your posts quite agreeable. The entire debate is about the possible risk of mining centralisation versus the possible risk of not being able to accommodate more users on the blockchain and therefore force them off-chain into the hands of centralised payment processors (which is just a different kind of centralisation).
It's odd that someone would place blind faith in the developers alone to decide the outcome, because that would mean Bitcoin is already centralised in a sense (developer centralisation, yet another kind). The very fact that we get to decide which fork to support is a guarantee that no one group or individual can become entrenched and make all the decisions about how the network is run. Of all the types of decentralisation, the ability for the users securing the network being able to enact change by running another client is vital. We should never allow a small minority to dictate what Bitcoin is or should be, otherwise we run the risk of encouraging corruption and repeating the mistakes of fiat money.
With regard to mining centralisation, personally, I don't foresee a larger blocksize leading to that. As the block reward diminishes over time, fees will become increasingly important to incentivise miners to continue securing the network, so naturally fees need to increase overall. The question is, do you make individual users pay a higher amount? Or do you allow the number of transactions to increase and collect a greater
quantity of fees. A larger number of users sending more transactions will naturally generate more fees. In turn, more fees should encourage more miners to secure the network and pay for any additional bandwidth they need to use (not less miners, like people keep assuming for reasons that still don't make any sense). If Bitcoin does ever turn into a niche plaything for the wealthy elites, just sending the odd large transaction every once in a while and everyone else is using something else to send small and medium sized payments, the "something else" they're using will probably attract more miners because of the higher transaction volume and the larger quantity of fees.
Obviously I can't guarantee it will turn out that way. No one knows for certain what the outcome will be, because it all depends on adoption. If adoption of crypto does surge and Bitcoin can't accommodate the extra users, which is the more likely outcome?
a) Users either put up with having to guess what fee they need to include to guarantee their transaction is confirmed in a reasonable time, or go off-chain and risk trusting a centralised service with their money
or
b) Users flock to another network that doesn't have an arbitrary 1MB cap, which can accommodate more transactions on a blockchain and confirms quickly without higher fees and guessing games
People tend to make the assumption that a larger blocksize would encourage more microtransactions or other transactions sent without a fee. To an extent, that's
possible (but not a certainty by any means), so there is a balance to be struck to ensure there is space enough for legitimate fee-paying transactions, but not so much space that most of the traffic being processed doesn't give any reward for the miners securing the network. 1MB almost certainly isn't enough, but how much is too much? That's where most of the discourse seems to focus, and rightly so. Balls to all this nonsense about the 21 million cap, that's just a distraction by people who don't want us to focus on the real issue, which is scalability versus decentralisation and the potential consequences of getting it wrong.
