Note: Rusty Russell is an employee of Blockstream. Blockstream employees have for years been extremely vocal opponents of increasing Bitcoin's block size, and Blockstream employs many of the "current bitcoin developers" Rusty is referring to.
> 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.
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.