Let's just hope that it gets tested and implemented quickly. After SegWit there are certainly interesting things on the roadmap for Core; hopefully later there will be a standard block size increase.

There was a time where I used to "trust" (might not be the right word) his opinions. Even back when he suggested 20 MB blocks; this was probably because I misunderstood everything related to the block size debate just as many do today. Over time one could easily see that he can't be trusted as he used to. 20 MB would have definitely harmed the system that we are using right now.

Core's approach should be okay for 2016. SegWit actually needs less code than XT needed for the increase (according to Maxwell). Let's just hope that it gets tested and implemented quickly. After SegWit there are certainly interesting things on the roadmap for Core; hopefully later there will be a standard block size increase.

Good idea or not, SOMEBODY will try to mess up the network (or co-opt it for their own use) sooner or later.  They'll either hack the existing code or write their own version, and will be a menace to the network.

I admire the flexibility of the scripts-in-a-transaction scheme, but my evil little mind immediately starts to think of ways I might abuse it.  I could encode all sorts of interesting information in the TxOut script, and if non-hacked clients validated-and-then-ignored those transactions it would be a useful covert broadcast communication channel.

That's a cool feature until it gets popular and somebody decides it would be fun to flood the payment network with millions of transactions to transfer the latest Lady Gaga video to all their friends...

Recently Bitcoin came close to unmitigated disaster, in the following way: Gavin diplomatically suggested that miners increase their block size, from the previous magic number of "250k" to something they themselves pick. This approach is flawed: the solution to the problem of having a magic number in the code is not passing the responsibility of choosing it to a larger group. It may work politically, in the sense that where large, vague groups are responsible for a bad move nobody will ever be hung. It does not work practically.

It's quite plain to anyone with a clue that 2FA/GA/whatever is roughly speaking the equivalent of the Windows antivirus, or more classically of the "spray some holy water on it". Originally it was devised to patch a fundamentally broken security systemii and it works about as well as you'd expect a patch to a fundamentally broken security system to work. It doesn't do anything for security, but it does a lot for security theater, and so it's incredibly popular among the fetishistic mass, which feels a lot safer if it has something to physically clutch. Win-win, right ?

Under the guise of this nonsense, which offers no value, no utility and no benefit, Gavin artfully inserts the proposal of utterly breaking Bitcoin. Having a server allow your transactions is simply taking Bitcoin and turning it back into PayPal. Does your government want a way to block Bitcoin transactions, Gavin ?

oops

A second version would be a massive development and maintenance hassle for me. It's hard enough maintaining backward compatibility while upgrading the network without a second version locking things in. If the second version screwed up, the user experience would reflect badly on both, although it would at least reinforce to users the importance of staying with the official version. If someone was getting ready to fork a second version, I would have to air a lot of disclaimers about the risks of using a minority version. This is a design where the majority version wins if there's any disagreement, and that can be pretty ugly for the minority version and I'd rather not go into it, and I don't have to as long as there's only one version.

I think people should have a clear understanding that a fork without major consensus will double the money supply thus break the fundamental promise of limited total money supply of bitcoin, it is just self destruction. Everyone should make sure to kill it immediately when it shows up

You don't know how Bitcoin variance works.

Much less than an actual 75% of mining power may will inevitably get lucky and prematurely trigger a fork.

But as that variance is smoothed out over time by reversion to normal distribution, the >25% remaining miners will inevitably orphan the attacking Gavinista blockchain by solving several consecutive 1MB blocks.

Here is your next remedial lesson on Bitcoin Civil Wars:


Please hurry and catch up to the rest of the class.  You are (at minimum) 4.5 months behind.   

If classic reaches 51 percent, the rest will follow soon. The process is absolutely transparent.