A censorship resistant digital cash is being built, and it only took 6 small time CEOs to completely throw everyone off and almost derail the project. When someone like CME Group, who now has skin in the game, also starts pulling their weight, who knows if the bitcoin experiment will survive?
[0] https://twitter.com/arronschaar/status/928316853092433920
Bitcoin as it is now is crippled. There is no reason to block on chain scaling except for the Core maintainers to retain their power and allow their second layer solutions to viable.
Multiple dollar fees doesn't require any more arguments. The lack of arguments against on chain scaling, backed by actual research, is what's lacking.
> but the market is screaming "bitcoin is doing it right".
Have you considered that it's driven by speculation instead of technical merit? When the blockchain becomes unusable due to high fees and congestion the bottom will fall out. It cannot be driven by pure speculation forever.
Anyway at this point you're trying to predict the future and I'm sharing anecdotes so we're not getting anywhere, let's tackle your main point:
> The lack of arguments against on chain scaling, backed by actual research, is what's lacking.
The value of full nodes is widely understood by bitcoin contributors [0][1][2]. Increasing the block size directly increases the amount of resources required to run a full node. Increased bandwidth requirements is especially a problem.
It is up to the candidate (s2x), not the incumbent (core) to show that no, it won't be harder to run full nodes, or to show that you can have just as much security by running an SPV node. Because the candidate has failed to back up their proposal with evidence that security is not harmed, the proposal cannot be allowed to move forward. Makes sense?
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinBeginners/comments/3eq3y7/fu...
There is no credible research done, there are no numbers, yet even the smallest size increase is blocked.
It's also blocked by the same people who have previously supported even larger increases. What made them change their minds? Sure isn't any new research.
But the fundamental issue is that not everyone need to run a full node as long as you can connect to sufficiently many nodes yourself. There's simply no point in engaging in full node fetishism where everyone need to run one where the worst internet connection hamstrings the entire network. Most people run SPV wallets today anyway and the important nodes are the ones run by businesses and wallet services.
> There is no credible research done
That's precisely my point. Contributors have shown that full nodes are necessary to preserve the security of the network (see the links I posted), but the proposal of S2X was executed without ever engaging on a discussion to answer the very questions you are asking now.
They are good questions, and we should discuss them and we should answer them. But Jeff Garzik and the 5 other CEOs did not attempt to do this research and instead steamrolled ahead with btc1/s2x.
This has been a problem for years. For example Gavin thought 16MB would be perfectly safe. There's research being done now examining 1GB blocks and how that would affect propagation time. A lousy 2MB is honestly laughable.
Doing nothing isn't the pragmatic or sane approach, it's the insane one.
As for the 1GB block research you're talking about, it was literally presented 5 days ago. S2X proposal started in May and the fork was planned for next week. The way we want this secure digital money thing to work is that proposals that are controversial or that may affect security are researched and the research is reviewed over many months or years.
I know you want to take the quick approach and just LOWER FEES NOW, but we know -- from experience -- that a cowboy attitude with blockchains makes it trivial to lose a lot of money [3].
[0] https://blog.bitpay.com/bitpay-growth-2017/
[1] https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-...
[2] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#charts
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/08/accidental-bug-may-have-froz...
How about comparing Bitcoin's percentage of total market capitalization [0] which crashed from ~80% down to ~40% when the blocks became full? The last month has regained that quite a bit but you could speculate it's because the promise of long overdue on chain capacity increase.
> I know you want to take the quick approach and just LOWER FEES NOW
It's been years since the limit should have been increased. Yet here we are with no on chain scaling for Bitcoin even remotely close to reality.
> that a cowboy attitude with blockchains makes it trivial to lose a lot of money
You're really comparing apples and oranges if you compare raising the block size with Ethereum's poorly designed smart contracts.
It is overwhelmingly clear that cryptocurrencies in general is in an early phase and that more research is needed on the subject. Especially since it seems like we'll be running these systems on an even larger scale in the future. It does however seem like more energy is spent spreading soundbites on Twitter than anything that has even a vague resemblance to the scientific method.
There's also the fact that Satoshi put a pretty agreesive schedule for the deflationary aspect of Bitcoin. Fees were designed to gradually take over as the miner's reward. You and I may or may not agree with that policy, or the schedule it follows, but it is a policy that was designed in from the beginning.
Furthermore Bitcoin used a soft limit which miners themselves increased. This is now no longer possible.
Satoshi introduced the limit as spam protection and he also explained how it could be phased in using a hard fork (although the term was coined at a later date).
I quote:
It can be phased in, like:
if (blocknumber > 115000) maxblocksize = largerlimit
It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete.
When we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to upgrade.
No, a way for a few people to get rich has been built.