A lot of misconceptions:

> A well funded actor could severely distrupt bitcoin. Let's say they didnt allow tx into the chain for a year.

They would go bankrupt. Even the US government, the most well funded actor in the world, is going bankrupt all on its own without attacking bitcoin. I don't believe any entity on Earth has the resources to waste on a frivolous attack like this.

> We've yet to agree on the final mempool size... I think we'll only get one shot at it... The problem with any change is that you risk a chain split.

Mempool size defaults are not bound by consensus rules. You can already adjust your own mempool as you see fit by updating bitcoin.conf. Changing the default size is not to be taken lightly, but it's an entirely different category of proposal from consensus changes. There is no practical limit to the number of times we can change this default.

> We have to do a hard fork anyway due to the great consensus cleanup.

We have to hard fork due to the year 2106 bug. GCC is a soft fork change that we don't *need* to merge, although I think it's a very good idea and I would support that proposal if/when it picks up steam. (With one caveat, see below.)

When it comes to block size changes I agree that it may be a good idea far in the future but we have barely scratched the surface in terms of efficiency improvements with the existing ~4.5MB block size. I think we can safely ignore these proposals for a long time to come. Segwit gave us plenty of space to play with. Let's maximize the resources we have before making any change that might compromise decentralization.

I'm personally in favor of a covenant soft fork. I think we can improve blockspace efficiency by orders of magnitude with e.g. GSR, LNHANCE, or similar. But I recently came to the realization that our mining pool centralization problems are too great to risk any consensus change. I oppose any soft fork proposal until we make material progress on mining pool decentralization. This is why I decided to do something about it.

Stay tuned for Hashpools, a new kind of mining pool powered by ecash. I'm obviously biased but I think it's gonna be a big deal. Hoping to publish something in the November timeframe. Catch me at btc++ Berlin or TABconf (assuming my talk is accepted 🤞) to get an early look. If you can't make it, no problem. I will publish on nostr. 

 Firstly, thanks for an informative and polite exchange.  We need more of this, and bitcoin will do well.  I also think the tools for conversation will improve too.

Agree stratumv2 is a big next thing, and we need to think about prioritization.

I'm against a soft fork (covenants) primarily because we have yet to explore the tools we have already.  The other issue is that it can lead to a chain split, which is a real risk, if the community is divided.  We also dont know the unintended consequnces.  History has shown that over-confident developers overlook these routinely.  Could I live with a soft fork, maybe.

Sounds like you're doing great work.  Hope your talk is accepted!