Pieter Wuile said: That's exactly the point: a hard fork does not just affect miners, and cannot just get decided by miners. All full nodes must have accepted the new rules, or they will be forked off when the hashrate percentage triggers. Click to expand...

Pieter Wuile said: Furthermore, 75% is pretty terrible as a switchover point, as it guarantees that old nodes will still see a 25% forked off chain temporarily. Click to expand...

Pieter Wuile said: My opinion is that the role of Bitcoin Core maintainers is judging whether consensus for a hard fork exists, and is technically necessary and safe. We don't need a hashpower vote to decide whether a hardfork is accepted or not, we need to be sure that full noded will accept it, and adopt it in time. A hashpower vote can still be used to be sure that miners _also_ agree. Click to expand...

Hi Pieter:And with the recent launch of Bitcoin Unlimited, nodes are taking matters into their own hands. There are now 34 nodes that will accept blocks larger than 1 MB *today*. They are not bothering to wait for BIP101 to activate. Instead, they are saying loud and clear: “if anyone produces a large block, we’ll follow you!”Bitcoin Unlimited has now shown empirically that all nodes do NOT need to have the same rules regarding the block size limit. This was previously not understood even by thought leaders such as Maxwell and Back (who argued that Bitcoin was a delicate consensus system and all nodes must have identical rules).Right now, no miner dares produce a larger block because it will certainly be orphaned. But eventually, when enough nodes have increased their own block size limits for what they will accept, a brave miner will produce a large block, it will be accepted into the Blockchain, and we'll look back at this debate and laugh.Bitcoin Unlimited has given us experience with this too. With Bitcoin Unlimited you can intentionally fork yourself off the chain by setting your block size very low. What happens is just that you no longer see new blocks and there are warnings that you may not be tracking consensus.In other words, you don’t lose any coins and it’s obvious that something is wrong.I am very happy to see the Core team begin to talk about ideas like “Emergent Consensus” and express that the role of developers is *not* to dictate terms to the user base. However, for consensus to efficiently emerge in the first place, we need efficient signalling and communication across the community. We need to be able to talk openly about how we want the network to evolve, and that means we need to be able to promote things like Bitcoin Unlimited. It has already given us a lot a experience about just how safe it is for an individual node to just go ahead and increase his block size limit: the node will still track consensus! This is now known both theoretically and empirically.I would like to see more leaders—like several of you on this mailing list are—speak out against the censorship and avoid places like /r/bitcoin where it is so prevalent. For consensus to emerge, we need reliable communication channels.Best regards,Peter