As one who's tried thousands of times to explain this to people, but many are stuck in their ways & always having to go back to Windows or Mac because it's the only two options is now the past (Unix/Linux or Open Source Operating Systems have been around for well over a decade). The funny thing is both Ubuntu & Linux Mint are just like a Mac or Windows build, give a Windows user Mint (Cinnamon Edition) & a Mac user Ubuntu (Unity Desktop). It's been over a decade of non-stop people wanting their XP (Vista or 7), even when there's a better soulution out there & the cost of users is far less. I don't dislike Windows, but am not a fan of Mac Apple & only because of the poverty it takes to utilize. As a kid wanting the fancy shoes, but all grown up & will take the payless brand knowing the cost labor in said buy.

I use this for years already, was just waiting you fall in your own web like every troll.

What about we tone it down and remain respectful to one another?

I'm not really being hostile I'm sorry if it is being perceveid as this (except to Illodin because he will keep assuming things to fit his narrative).

It's one of those situations where we can't qualify every statement that is made.

It's like saying that we should change the Monero slogan from "secure, private, untraceable" to "secure (as long as you don't leak your private keys and no exploit or bug exists which lets someone steal your funds), private (as long as you're using i2p, coming soon, and the counterparties you deal with don't reveal your details), untraceable (as long as everyone is using mixin >0 and no systematic reveal of inputs leaks the real one)"...which is not quite as catchy;)

As well as being default, is it an enforced minimum?

The default is enabled immediately, along with some of the other changes (if you build the code yourself, or once there is a binary to download otherwise). The enforced minimums will happen in six months or so once the fork goes into effect.

Sure, it's an absolutely valid concern.

I think the important thing is not to compare Monero's block size with Dash, but firstly with Bitcoin so that we have a baseline. Monero's transactions are smaller than Bitcoin's, like-for-like. So if Monero were a "transparent blockchain" like Bitcoin's we would have a smaller blockchain than Bitcoin for the same transactions! But since part of Monero's "opaqueness" involves hiding the origin of transactions by making inputs appear to come from multiple transactions, this incurs an additional size penalty. This means that, for the same number of transactions, Monero's blockchain is about 4-5 times bigger than Bitcoin's.

It is important to note, though, that any privacy feature will have a similar impact. Dash's DarkSend, centralised Bitcoin mixing services, or even decentralised initiatives like JoinMarket (which is built on the CoinJoin scheme) all have an increased transaction size. If they are enforced on every transaction (ie. on a protocol level) it means the entire blockchain is significantly larger - and that applies to Bitcoin too!

The reality when it comes to blockchain sizes is that linear blockchain bloat is largely insignificant. What I mean when I say that is this: which is more convenient to host, a 350gb blockchain, or a 1.58tb blockchain? Well they're both inconveniently large, and whilst you could argue that a 350gb blockchain fits on a 512gb SSD today (where a 1.58gb blockchain doesn't) it's obviously growing so fast it'll outstrip that storage space in a matter of months. Basically any blockchain above, like, 20gb is a complete pain in the posterior.

The solution to this problem is not to try incremental, linear decreases in blockchain size. If you have a useful cryptocurrency that people are using the blockchain is going to be large. Suck it up, embrace it, accept it right now. Rather, the long-term solution can be found in blockchain pruning, whereby we cut off all the historical data and only keep a subset (the utxoset for Bitcoin, and the txoset + key image set for Monero). In this Bitcoin has a slightly different approach to Monero, where nodes are either "archival" (keeping the entire blockchain) or "current" (keeping a small portion). With Monero we will be implementing pruning in a per-node configurable basis, where node operators can choose to either keep the whole chain (default), keep only the last M blocks, or keep everything from block N. This will mean that, as a node syncs up, it will find progressively more nodes that have the blocks it is requesting, until it reaches the top block in the network, and every node has that available:)

One of the reasons I don't participate much.  Trolling and flame wars stopped being interesting to me in the usenet days.