adamstgbit said:
Why is it bitcoin didnt fork earlier if its such a good solution to the difference in opinion?
because everyone recognizes how messy that is and how it create a "war".
and we understand that the best solution is one which makes compromise and attempts to satisfy everyone. we went from 20MB to 8MB to 2MB because the small blockers have a legitimate point.
we are not forced to work together but there are strong incentives to not forking bitcoin spinoff style. and i think thats a good thing, the more the merrier, if we start splitting off, it will become easier to come to consensus on future changes, and thats not a good thing... its good that devs/poeple are sorta forced to all agree on changes.
There was a "50 bitcoin forever" fork when we had the first reward halving, for some reason (I guess the forker is just a casual programmer, thus did not adjust difficulty), that fork did not grow due to no hash power support
We did not have more spin off fork later on, since at that time all the devs were still catching up with the architecture of bitcoin and try to improve on it, they worked towards the same direction. Then BS had the idea of changing bitcoin into a settlement network by limiting on chain capacity
In fact I supported that idea from the beginning: Even Fedwire does 4 tps and handles thousands of banks in US, why can not bitcoin? But I'm against core not because of the technical reasons, but because they are against the consensus of economy majority. No matter how genius an idea is, without major consensus, it should not be implemented
Then we had the second consensus meeting at HongKong, I found out that BScore devs clearly prioritize their agenda above consensus, and even want to manipulate consensus through social engineering like back door meetings with miners. Then the whole thing changed
After spending some time and look carefully at those arguments by small blockers, I tends to believe that they are just excuses to drag the development into BS's direction. There is no evidence that a large block will create nodes centralization, it is all imaginary threat
The only valid concern is that a large transaction with huge amount of OPSIG will take a long time to verify, but that has been limited by the new code in the latest releases, so that argument does not hold any more
In fact, the mining centralization has always been magnitudes worse than node centralization TODAY, and no devs cares or find a way to fix it, so it further proved that all those talks about node centralization are just excuses
In an ideal world, it will be good that blocks can be as small as possible, and move lots of micro transactions off chain, since low value transactions don't need blockchain level security. But anyway, consensus must be reached first. It does not hurt to raise the block size to 2MB following major consensus and explore a better off chain solution at mean time