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by ianpurton 3698 days ago
As I see it there are 2 main competing philosophies for Bitcoin.

1. Digital Gold. Pseudo anonymous value storage that can't be tampered with by third parties.

2. A payment network with transaction levels that match Visa.

It appears the 2 are not compatible.

For 1 we need more nodes, and node counts from my understanding are on the way down.

For 2 we need to increase the blocksize, but this might decrease the number of people willing to run nodes.

I think we have to look at the way we use Bitcoin today, after all the experiment has been running for a few years now. I don't know anyone who is using Bitcoin for day to day spending. But I do know people who are using it as an investment or for value storage.

So in my view the market has decided.

The miners have also decided. They were offered a solution with increased blocksize and they voted no.

That's consensus.