@jonny1000 good summary of what I thought your view was, and the tables also help.
Also the way you put the strategic considerations makes more sense now: people of your view are rallying around the status quo and some are even censoring forums in order to protect against what you see as an attack, until that attack goes away.
You should probably take note that it's never going away. There may be proposals you like better, like Classic with 95% threshold, but I still don't see why you think no one else is free to offer those. It's like you think we're rallying around Gavin or something. It doesn't make any sense to me in the end, because anyone can fork the code, and every conceivable proposal can be offered and downloaded by anyone. How does it matter that a group of people calling themselves "Bitcoin Classic devs" have offered something you don't like? Just change it. Or hire some anonymous person to change it and follow them. Circling the wagons seems about as effective as sticking your head in the sand.
EDIT: I see you probably think the solution is to just soft fork everything. Then it moves the question down to
@Roger_Murdock's objection, discussed below.
The whole point of Bitcoin is for the participants to agree on one chain, unfortunately in order to do that, we need to agree on the rules for block validity.
So here is where I think you may be confusing something: "the participants"* need to agree on one chain, yes, and Nakamoto consensus is what does this. "The participants" does NOT mean all current bitcoiners, because the network can fork and split into persistent chains starting with the same ledger state, each with their own set of "the participants" who agree with the other members of that set but disagree with the other set of "the participants." Since the ledger can be copied without any dilution and the two sets of participants can go their separate ways and see whether the market supports one and/or the other, there is no problem. People are free to bet on one chain or the other if they want, otherwise hodlers are unaffected and sound money carries on unscathed.
Bitcoin is a system for ensuring participants
who agree on the rules among themselves always converge on a single chain. Bitcoin is NOT a system for ensuring that all current participants with different views on the rules stay in agreement as to "the" valid chain, and there is no reason for it Bitcoin to be this way, as it adds no value.
*a set of people who agree to a certain set of protocol rules governing what everyone now calls the Bitcoin ledger; there could be the Core participants and the Classic participants, for example.
Another way of looking at the confusion is that you are viewing the situation from two different time perspectives and arbitrarily switching between them: in one case you are looking at the ledger before the fork, and in other cases you are looking after the fork when the two ledger-copies have diverged and what counts as "Bitcoin" becomes up to which fork the market supports. Before the fork, as you said, "we need to agree on the rules for block validity," but after the fork there are two
we's, so there can be two different sets of rules for block validity. The market determines which set of rules (coupled with its associated ledger-copy) counts as "Bitcoin." It is a subtle process regarding the naming conventions, but once it is done - likely before it even begins, thanks to futures trading - the naming will be clear and no one will remember the disfavored fork.
What do you think of the following objection? Do I have your position right in my response?
This assumes that people are helpless automatons. "I really don't approve of this soft fork, but what can I do? The version of software I'm currently running will automatically recognize it as valid." A successful soft fork just means that a disgruntled minority who doesn't support it has to take affirmative steps if they want to avoid being swept along with it. It doesn't magically strip them of their ability to break away. (In contrast, a disgruntled minority who doesn't want to follow a hard fork can simply sit on their hands and not upgrade.) But this difference just isn't that important. The real forces "keeping the herd together" following a fork attempt (whether soft or hard) are the economic incentives driving convergence on a single chain.
The difference can be important enough. In the 95% consensus view, a softfork can piss off even say 20% of people, as long as no more than 5% are peeved enough to take the extra steps of hard forking away - which is a pretty high threshold since hard forking seems (at least that time, without things like fork arbitrage having been established) like a big deal. For stuff of that level of irritation, people just go, "Damn that's a shame," and move on (or maybe switch to altcoins "for a while" - see Samson Mow's tweet quoted above). Whereas if a similar change were proposed as a hardfork and 20% opposed, they might be dragged along but - in the minds of the people who see "social contract" and status quo as what holds Bitcoin together - this would represent a great risk.
Beyond this I can't really fathom the argument from an investment, PR, and practical standpoint, unless the hardfork into two persistent chains is deemed to be somehow impossible or infeasible for technical reasons (or some perceived PR reasons I'm not seeing). Then the bar is high enough that indeed people usually won't just turn around and answer a soft fork with a hard fork.
This is a very revealing quote that we should take into consideration. This is basically the self-aggrandizing way of saying "because it's not our idea".
Charitably, I take it to mean, "The status quo is the most salient thing (Schelling point) to rally around if we're going to retreat into a tortoise shell." I just don't get how that's particularly effective as a strategy. The "attack" will never end, so they can never leave the shell. (EDIT: They intend to stay in the shell and soft fork everything. Ah, so the whole worldview again shows some superficial coherence. Even if they glimpse some of the forkist viewpoint they cannot hold onto it, because the mutually reinforcing aspects of their own Extreme Consensus view pull them back in.)
