@Zangelbert Bingledack
that's a great point.
so many of you guys have made this thread great over 
many years with great posts
.  just for the sake of yanking control away from r/bitcoin and BCT, all you would have to do is copy/paste some of your many insightul posts from here or back from the old thread as a New Thread in these new alternative forums.  i'm sure you would get plenty of comments and good feedback.
i actually seem to notice an effect of a comment i made to /u/singularity87 the other day.  i told him i was appreciative of the fact that he glommed onto an old post by sipa in early 2013 stating he was in favor of 10-100MB blocks.  i told singularity that many of us just let damning contradictions like that  go unchallenged b/c of weariness in the blocksize debate.  since then, and probably unrelatedly, i seem to detect an increase of new threads digging stuff like that up being posted in the alternative subreddits. 
we need to stay on it.  i feel the tide is turning.
[doublepost=1446918084][/doublepost]i think 
@chmod755 is right.  i need to stop posting on r/bitcoin when at all possible. 
i don't think i'd pass up an opportunity to state my views on BS, SC's, or LN if given a compelling opportunity though.
[doublepost=1446918596,1446917881][/doublepost]interesting post on SC's by MIke:
WRT side chains - the main problem I see with side chains is that they create a complexity explosion inside wallets, and side chains don't compose. That doesn't mean they're useless, they might be a kind of better testnet, but they aren't a replacement for putting their features directly into the Bitcoin block chain. By "don't compose" I mean consider what happens if you want to use features X and Y together but they exist only on separate side chains. You can't do it. With the features in the same block chain you can compose them, e.g. use a crowdfunding/assurance contract together with multisig.