(I have my opinions, but more important to warn people who may be mislead by the title)
Knowing Rusty personally and given his long history as a FLOSS contributor, it is at least clear to me that he's speaking from his own perspective and not because Blockstream is paying him too.
> Blockstream employees have for years been extremely vocal opponents of increasing Bitcoin's block size
Yes, for many years, years before Blockstream even existed!
Edit: note that these very same developers are also pushing for segwit, which doubles the block size and the on-chain transaction capacity of the bitcoin network. It's quite odd to say they're "opponents of increasing Bitcoin's block size" given that they want to double it. What they're really against is specific proposals for increasing the blocksize, proposals which break compatibility and introduce a chain-split risk for no good reason.
1) segwit is not "doubles the block size", effective increase is ~1.7x _AFTER_ full adoption and switching everyone to the new tx format (which is impossible for next few years). Also, it's one-time bump, can not be repeated if necessary
2) they're "introduce a chain-split risk" precisely by going against community. Without this shitshow almost zero risk upgrade was expected
Yes, it is a one-time increase, but one that is sufficient for now. Let's start by doubling the block size first, collect more data, then decide how to further increase the blocksize as the need arises.
2) I'm not seeing that they're going against the community. The technical, business and wide bitcoin community are all looking forward eagerly for segwit's activation.
Edit: also, in the case of a hard-fork, users who don't upgrade gets cut off the network entirely. is it not preferable to keep them a part of the network, with somewhat higher fees but a functional wallet otherwise?
> but one that is sufficient for now
not really - see above.
2) > The technical, business and wide bitcoin community are all looking forward eagerly
Do they understand segwit activation provides zero benefits at moment of said activation?
3) Overall, we're in the stage of planned bitcoin deconstruction. Gladly, there are no way to kill cryptocurrencies - even if bitcoin going to die, someone else will take it's place (related: see "bitcoin market share" chart)
P.S. We're talking about wrong problem. "How exactly 2MB blocks should be implemented" is surely wrong direction of talks. Yet we're here for like two years and counting. Whole ecosystem could be progressed by a lot during this time
Also anyone who upgrades immediately gets the benefit of lower fees. Their transactions are halved in size, from the fee calculation perspective.
Rusty, I'd suggest to replace that with "a significant number of current bitcoin developers". There are Bitcoin Developers who may support the 2MB fork. "The current bitcoin developers" don't really make any centralized decisions on what to support or not.
I'm also aware of no person with more than 5 years experience developing the Bitcoin protocol or it's implementations who have ever been in support of it.
Lots of people are supportive of various capacity increase things without being supported by the reckless last minute backdoor dealing. More comments can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6h612o/can_someone...
Jeff Garzick is a developer?
This is a haiku.
Here are his recent commits: https://github.com/btc1/bitcoin/commits/segwit2x
Bitcoin-core != Bitcoin.
That's misleading. The fork isn't supported by the developers of the Bitcoin Core wallet, but it is supported by the developers of the Bitcoin Classic, Unlimited, and BTC1 wallets.
Your entire argument boils down to a no true Scotsman logical fallacy. ie: these people disagree with me therefore they are not Bitcoin developers.
A month old hastily made fork of Bitcoin Core which has not yet ever had a release (just lots of release candidates), unless I missed a recent announcement.
> who is in fact a Bitcoin developer and has been for a very long time.
Nonsense, Jeff hasn't been a Bitcoin developer for years. I believe he's mostly been involved with Ethereum for a long time.
People aren't saying he isn't a developer because they disagree, but because showing up and making a toy software fork doesn't grant you credibility or experience. ... and, in fact, he's shown that he doesn't have it pretty thoroughly, for example his code only managed to actually increase the blocksize a couple hours before his first release candidate because he completely misunderstood how it worked.