Major Bitcoin-to-bank payment processor releases protocol,consensus trojan horse

For those who haven't been following what's been going on in the Bitcoin space:

Various groups have been proposing new rules that govern what constitutes a valid Bitcoin block (Called consensus rules). Bitcoin, as a blockchain protocol, functions by communicating with other peers in the network that meet the same consensus characteristics.

If a peer communicates a block to you that is in disagreement with your consensus rules, your node bans that peer. Similarly, if you update the blockchain with a block that is in disagreement with what your peers consider as a valid block (say you increase the mining reward) your block is rejected by your peers.

What Bitpay has done in this situation is tell their clients that the code that they are releasing is for a feature (Segwit - segregated witness) that doesn't break consensus while simultaneously implements a change to the blocksize which breaks consensus with all other nodes on the Bitcoin blockchain.

The ethical issue here is that Bitpay hasn't disclosed these consensus-violating changes in their release notes and any client following their instructions will be out of compliance / consensus with the rest of the Bitcoin network.

Imagine if ICANN "released an update" enabling new top level domains (that everyone agreed was something they wanted) while installing software that simultaneously turned it into AOL/Compuserve and fracturing those nodes off of the internet -- AND DIDN'T DISCLOSE TO USERS THEY WERE DOING SUCH.

Bitpay's motive here is likely that they want to force the network to change and gain political control, by fracturing the Bitcoin network into the two consensus paradigms: The legacy Bitcoin consensus and Bitpay "btc1" consensus.