Had a pretty
bizarre conversation with Adam Back a few days ago in which he tried to point to widely-used
soft limits on block size to argue that blocks "have effectively been nearly-instantly 'full' for many years." I tried to explain how absolutely absurd this was, pointing out that:
The "soft limits" you're referring to and the constraining "consensus-rule"-style 1-MB block size limit are completely different animals. The former isn't a real "limit" at all as it's a trivial matter for an individual miner to adjust. The context for this discussion is the claim that if we were to increase the latter limit (which is an actual limit as miners that violate it will have their blocks orphaned by the rest of the network), that blocks would immediately "fill up." That is an absurd and completely anti-empirical claim. Indeed, the fact that many miners allowed their soft limits to be bumped into before increasing them is, if anything, evidence against the claim that miners would immediately produce "full" blocks if the actual network limit were increased (because it represents miners voluntarily limiting the size of their blocks).
But I eventually gave up trying to get through to him.
/u/medieval_llama had a great quote on reddit that I thought summarized a lot of key governance ideas very succinctly:
"Bitcoin is anarchy. Miners vote with hashrate, users vote with their money, merchants vote by what currencies they accept. Consensus is an emergent property of this, not a requirement."
I also thought he did a nice job of summarizing what the Core concern trolling about "strong replay protection" is really about:
Re: this whole issue of "replay protection," I feel increasingly convinced of the following:
I think it's the responsibility of those choosing to create a minority spinoff by refusing to follow the most-PoW chain to add strong replay protection by hard-forking to a new mandatory transaction format. So I do think if the mining majority want to make the planned 2X upgrade a success, they should be prepared to 51% attack and destroy a SegWit1X chain that refuses to at least implement strong replay protection (if not also change its PoW). It's not clear how viable a minority hashrate SegWit1X chain would be without hard forking in an EDA given the brutal economics of the "difficulty death spiral." But in any event, I think 2X supporters should commit to killing off such a chain (forcing it to hard fork) to render any bogus argument that it represents the "real" / "original" Bitcoin (and is thus somehow entitled to the "Bitcoin" / "BTC" name and ticker) even more untenable than it would already be. To be clear, I'm totally fine with people deciding to maintain a minority hashrate SegWit1x chain starting from a particular UTXO snapshot. (I don't see a whole lot of utility in such a thing, but different strokes for different folks.) But if they don't want their chain to be viewed as hostile, they need to go about it in a way that minimizes disruption to the actual Bitcoin chain.
I'd also note that simply voicing a credible threat to destroy a non-hardforking 1-MB chain could potentially make such an attack unnecessary by increasing the potency of the "difficulty death spiral" dynamic.
