Oddbean

Adding the extension blocks was not needed for Lightning, no. It was a concession to the parties who wanted bigger blocks. Ultimately it wasn’t enough, and they forked off anyway. In retrospect, we probably should not have added that extra space, but it’s impossible to say with certainty how history would have unfolded if we hadn’t. We could soft-fork in a reduction that cuts that back out, or makes it smaller. Or we could fork in a reduction to the main block size. It takes a hard fork to go from 1MB to 2MB, but only a soft fork to limit it to 500kb or less.

This irresistable desire some people have to mess with the thing just blows my mind. My only explanation is that the kind of people who want to mess with a perfectly functional network just don't have any bitcoin in their stack and are therefore more interested in "iNnoVat1on" than they are protecting the hardest money ever created. Bitcoin, in it's current form, solves the problem of the hard money. Messing with it in an attempt to make it do other shit, like parlor tricks, is nothing but risk and adds no significant value. Innovation in Bitcoin is nothing more than an attack on a perfectly functional network. If it aint broken, don't fix it. Simple wisdom but so few people actually understand it.

That’s probably true. I’ll bet Rusty and his family have a small percentage of net worth in bitcoin. It makes sense that the greater the percentage, the more conservative you likely are. People should probably not be core devs if they don’t have meaningful skin in the game. Hard to prove this though.

yes. At least we've got Saylor going public on the subject now. Good to have such an articulate and vocal supporter. "Why doesn't Saylor support core devs"? Cause fuck core, they can't even fix their filters. Those guys do nothing but fuck the network up with their soft fork attacks. Core is the biggest threat to Bitcoin by far. If Bitcoin fails it's going to be because they soft-forked some bullshit in there that allowed it to be captured.