i've noticed some convo about whether we should be happy staying with Core if they did a last minute 2MB HF to satisfy the community.
my personal opinion is that we should NOT be happy with this. and that is b/c of the extent of the lying, misrepresentations, character assasinations, and overall despicable tactics that have been used over this last year to stall the blocksize debate. of course, these are only my opinions as i, more than most here, have been the subject of those tactics.
but more importantly, stepping back and looking at it objectively, i believe there is more than enough evidence to suggest that The Fidelity Effect is real and present. the fiat world will not invest heavily in Bitcoin as long as core dev is controlled by Blockstream. and this has nothing to do with the blocksize. it has to do with the control of money. to understand this, we have to go back and look at Satoshi's Original Vision. he meant Bitcoin to be an unregulated, decentralized, p2p currency with all the properties of digital gold, to be used by people all over the world in a cheap, fast and inexpensive manner. it's really the only form of value that needs decentralization to keep it away from censorship by gvts. decentralization is not needed to trade stocks, bonds, smart contracts or other forms of value. and that's b/c the real problems of today's financial world is the central bank printing of money. that's why i keep saying that Bitcoin should stick to money; if it can tap into the biggest market in the world, the Forex trading of $5T/day (the result of unfettered central bank printing), then Bitcoin will Moon. but it needs to stay focused on it's money function and not get distracted by Blockstream's World of Warcraft trading platforms like LN & SC's, etc. an example of what i'm saying can be taken from Arvind's talk yesterday at MIT. he gave the example of Namecoin as an example where you'd think the market would love the idea; decentralized DNS naming. it's really the only example from the early days, and even now, where merge mining sort of worked. but overall, his message is that it's been a failure. i'd agree. that's b/c it is not focused on the money function which he actually misses in his presentation. once again, i believe that the only reason Bitcoin gained traction and has grown the way it has is b/c of the promise of being an open source, uncontrolled, unregulated, non-conflicted revolutionary, non-governmental form of money that harnesses the Digital Age. if it can accomplish this it will lead to unfettered global adoption by the people's of the world, ie, The People's Money.
if Blockstream is left in control, there is no reason to believe that Bitcoin can be those things. during this lengthy and ferocious debate, core dev has been slipping in LN tools like CSV, CLTV, CPFP, & RBF via soft forks over this last year. there's talk of version bits and other unexplained coding changes that try to make Classic, XT, or BU incompatible. that shows that they have no shame in subverting the core principles of Bitcoin even while being watched. they actually believe they can obfuscate their actions and pull the wool over our eyes while doing so with techno speak. that's how powerful $76M can be to cloud one's mind. and it is true that it is incredibly hard to stop them when done as a soft fork, which will get even harder if SW gets adopted. which is why i really don't like this concept of a wide open script versioning system that allows them to do almost anything as a soft fork. i think sophisticated investors and ordinary ppl can see this and will never move from a fiat Federal Reserve regime to that of a Blockstream controlled regime. hell, i'd take Janet over Maxwell any day. i also doubt, in aggregate, that Wall St will like it. altho that won't stop them from humoring us with projects like R3. we will lose if we let Blockstream stay in control.