I. "I agree a big discussion is necessary before changes are made, but we shouldn't act like a hard fork is somehow inherently an issue."

Part and parcel of the present dispute is to clearly make the point that Gavin Andresen does not have the authority to enact or create a hardfork of the Bitcoin network, nor any sort of significant clout, cachet, power to influence the matter etc.

This will be useful for the Bitcoin network first and foremost, because Gavin is, by and large, a mentally retarded doofus displaying a shocking amount of Dunning-Kruger syndrome in his assorted dabblings in economics and other hard fields.

This will secondarily but perhaps still notably be useful for Gavin himself. Finally liberated from all that influence he is incorrectly perceived to carry he will be free to live the rest of his life in the relative peace his brain was constructed to handle. To understand his situation, imagine a mentally retarded child living happily in the sands of New Mexico. A rich old man dies in New York, and on the strength of original research, it is considered that the mentally retarded child is the sole inheritor. News makes its way to the happy desert residence that same evening, by telegraph, but the poor monkey knows nothing of it outside of dim rumors. He is not collected enough to understand what "inheritance" rightly means or anything. He does have some sort of an idea as to "being rich" = "lots of icecream", but that's as far as it goes. All sorts of people, much better placed to understand what it all means, all try their hand at, you know, "being friendly". And "neighbourly". And only meaning the best and having the kid's interest at heart. His life, as you might well imagine, turns into the sort of nightmare only homo homini lupus can bring on its brother, and the child lives hell (parce-que l'enfer, c'est l'autres). Once the news makes it through that really, it was all a mistake, no such inheritance exists (as in fact it does not), the simpleton is free to return to his simple prior life, and be happy again.

Help Gavin be a happy idiot, stop trying to make him fulfill shoes too large for his little peabrain.

II. "If the community can't hardfork today we could stop using bitcoin now and look for the better suited alt coin. If bitcoin can't fork-update it has no value."

Obviously Bitcoin "has no value" to you. That is probably because you were expecting to defraud the faith others put in Bitcoin by inflating it. While it's true that welfare states finance themselves that way currently, and in the process create the unwelcome and unwarranted impression in the heads of the nobodies in the street that their voice matters to any degree or is important in any manner, Bitcoin does not work that way. Bitcoin does not work that way intentionally, specifically and by design. So... yeah, pack it and get lost.

"The community" of people that need things can not fork Bitcoin to provide for their needs at the expense of the actual community of people that create things and own things. Related to this, let us reiterate those ancient points about Bitcoin :

TALKING ABOUT BITCOIN, EVEN IF IN A GROUP, DOES NOT MAKE YOU PART OF BITCOIN.

III. I don't understand why anybody would be against a larger block.

The popular name to this is "arguing to ignorance". You might also not understand why anyone would propose you wash, stop collecting broken car engines on plastic foil in front of your dilapidated motorhome or fucking your cousins. What you understand or don't understand is not a proper subject of discussion, and you aren't welcome to try and foist it on intelligent people who aren't your parents.

IV. Satoshi himself envisioned much larger blocks.

The discussion of what "Satoshi himself" did or didn't do, meant or didn't mean, so on and so forth is about as interesting and discussing the Mormon "bible".

This is called "arguing to authority", and it tries to give pecuniary value to that only truly worthless article of all times and places : the esteem of the mob. This may work well in electing United States presidents, ensuring that "while the voting public knows best what it wants, it deserves to get it long and hard". Bitcoin specifically and deliberately does not work in this way.

Bitcoin is not a reflection of your hopes and aspirations, but a check on them. Bitcoin isn't here to make it easier for you to do what you want to do ; Bitcoin is here to make it trivial for others to prevent you from doing what you want to do every time that's stupid. The sooner you comprehend this fundamental difference between Bitcoin and "technology" especially in the "revolutionary & innovative" subsense of that nonsense, the better, for you.

V. The fork is needed because otherwise some people won't be able to use Bitcoin.

Bitcoin isn't for everybody. Creating something useful that everyone can use is an exercise in trying to create something that's useful but worthless. Such a thing may exist, in the sense perpetuum mobile may exist. As far as the science of physics goes, they do not.

Should blocks ever become full, older coinbases will be prioritized over newer coinbases, and larger mining fees and transactions prioritized over smaller mining fees and smaller transactions. This means that someone who wishes to pay for very little with Bitcoin will be forced to use something else, so to speak is forced to "give his seat" to someone richer. This is exactly the point and the intent of Bitcoin : to force the poor to yield to the rich, unversally, as a matter of course.

You may not like this, but that is entirely an emotional problem of yours, which you're welcome to resolve any way you can : stop being poor, take a lot of pills, whatever. You may try to solve it by attempting to make it impossible for the rich to construct tools that they will then use to force you to yield to them, but this will necessarily not work : being rich means by definition they have more resources than you, and whatever you devise they can make a counter.

If you are more practically inclined, and having understood, accepted and come to terms with your fundamental human inferiority as it flows from your poverty, some solutions to your predicament of "I wish to buy myself a basket" have already been discussed :

For the reasons noted and for many other reasons I am pretty much satisfied that Bitcoin is not nor will it ever be a direct means of payment for retail anything. You may end up paying for a month's worth of coffee vouchers at your favourite coffee shop via Bitcoin (so shop scrip built on top of Bitcoin), you may end up settling your accounts monthly at the restaurant in Bitcoin (so store credit built on top of Bitcoin), you will probably cash into whatever local currency from Bitcoin (be it Unified Standard Dubaloos or Universally Simplified Dosidoes or whatever else) but all that is entirely different a story.

Run along now, back to playing in the mud with the other naked kids in your village. Bitcoin's just not for your kind.

VI. This is a clerical issue, because block propagation and other considerations incentivize miners to keep blocks small anyway. The 1MB is just a hard limit getting in the way of things, the marketplace of miners should be allowed to fix block size as it seems appropriate.

While this argument has been disingenuously brought by Gavin himself, the fact is that the proposed inverted bloom filters upgrade would allow all blocks to propagate in constant time, regardless of their size. Just the sort of deceitful poison flowing out of USG through its few remaining (but apparently well entrenched) Bitcoin moles.

VII. The miners decide.

No, they do not. The miners make some minor decisions in Bitcoin, but major decisions such as block forks are not at their disposition alone, and this for excellent reasons you'll readily understand if you stop and think about it.

There are two specific methods to control miners on this matter, which will make the scamcoin Gavin is trying to replace everyone's Bitcoin with only replace some people's Bitcoin. The first and most obvious is that irrespective of what miners mine, each single full node will reject illegal blocks. This is a fact. If all the miners out there suddenly quit Bitcon and go mine Keiser's Aurora scamcoin instead, from the perspective of the Bitcoin network hash rate simply dropped and that's all. There's absolutely no difference between Keiser's scamcoin and Gavin's scam coin as far as the network is concerned : while one's a scammer that I humiliatingly defeated in the past whereas the other a scammer that I humiliatingly defeat in the future, this makes no difference for Bitcoin. As far as anyone will be able to perceive, miners simply left.

The second and perhaps not as obvious has nevertheless been discussed at length on multiple occasions on #bitcoin-assets. Consider this terse explanation from March. 2013.

mircea_popescu: whoever has enough money to matter is likely to pick one chain for whatever reason

mircea_popescu: since fork means btc can be spent independently on either chain

mircea_popescu: he will sell his btc on one and perhaps buy on the other.

mircea_popescu: as a result prices will rapidly diverge, panicking the mass of users, and the fork is economically resolved.

The situation here is aggravated by the fact that the fork proposed is not simply nondeterministic behaviour, and so the holdings on the two chains aren't notionally equivalent. Instead, all the holdings on the Bitcoin chain are accepted as valid on both Bitcoin and Gavincoin, but holdings on Gavincoin are rejected by Bitcoin. Consequently, everyone involved with the fork is writing options to everyone in Bitcoin, free of charge. That they have no ready way to finance these should be obvious, and consequently the grim prospects of the Gavin side of the fork should be just as obvious. At least, to people who understand economy to any degree.

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