Even under bitcoinXT's own parameters, only miners can vote for the fork to be triggered. Only one of the companies that signed this document is directly involved with mining. I've seen many people trying to argue that with those captains of industry showing support to BIP101 adoption of Gavin's and Mike's proposal is unavoidable. That's not the case however. Those businesses are not the entirety of bitcoin ecosystem, and even if we disregard the vote mechanism embedded in bitcoinXT miners are still a very important part of the bitcoin economy. Like it or not, Chinese miners are a huge part of the mining business and they have good reasons to veto bitcoinXT, BIP101 or even everything Mike Hearn is involved with. Given that Mike has said that bitcoin could
do without China if the miners won't agree with him. If making the CEOs of those western companies sign this document in an attempt to make his
worst case scenario sound more reasonable then all I have to say it that I'm disgusted.
The good thing is that BIP101-enabled code (once deployed) would still follow the longest chain if the rest of the network decided to cap the block size at a static flat 8Mb. There simply won't be any block producers that would want to shoot higher than that. So there is no contradiction here.
But, I do agree, that BIP101 seems to be designed to significantly shift the balance of power in the network from regions with higher hashing capacity towards the ones with higher bandwidth, which is much harder to increase quickly in order to counter some potential abuses that may arise from this shift. Plus, the effects of block sizes larger than 8Mb on network's structural integrity are unknown at this stage.
We need to collect more data on network dynamics under the new hard limit in order to see how fast the technology is able to catch up and what other issues may arise from the increased capacity. For example, how the new limit affects the amount of full nodes and whether an average home internet connection is able to handle the load. Going with a static flat 8Mb limit might create some turbulence down the road, but eventually the tech will advance to the point that we will be "back to normal" with the new data to evaluate and decide how to move forward.
