Eli's Reply
First, let’s count our blessings. It’s good that there is no “official” organization that can control Bitcoin. Such an organization would be subject to political pressure and ultimately to political capture. Let’s be grateful that Bitcoin is so capture-resistant.
Second, hard forks allow controversial decisions about the direction of Bitcoin to be made by the market, not by particular developers. They are the method by which we decentralize Bitcoin governance. A policy of never allowing hard forks is tantamount to a policy of letting core developers, not the market, choose how Bitcoin will behave. Consequently, I am unsympathetic to the bitcoin.org policy of forbidding controversial hard forks.
This is how the system is supposed to work. If the big-blockists are able to persuade the majority of miners, exchanges, and users that bigger blocks are better, they will win in the end. If not, the small-blockists will win. Either way, in the end, the shorter chain will be abandoned eventually, and there will be only one Bitcoin again.
The community has several more months during which to debate this issue, since the fork will not occur before 2016. In the meantime, we should focus on improving the quality of arguments and communication so that the fork will be resolved in an informed manner.
All the best,
Eli Dourado
Director, Technology Policy Program
Mercatus Center
George Mason University
This was really helpful for me in understanding how Bitcoin consensus works. Thanks for seeking out and sharing the information, @adam. It shows that conversations like this are absolutely necessary to the future of Bitcoin, even if it all seems like a bunch of craziness sometimes.
This is how the system is supposed to work. If the big-blockists are able to persuade the majority of miners, exchanges, and users
I'm still left wondering, however (as someone who has less of a technical understanding): Where are the nodes in the equation? They are unpaid, run by volunteers, decreasing in number all the time, and not discussed on the same level that miners are discussed. Are they less important, or "becoming less important as it becomes easier to connect to the network" (as one person recently explained to me)? Do they matter in these block-size, hard-fork, consensus decisions?
