My fundamental problem with the model of continuous six month hard forks and experimental consensus layer changes is that it seems to me that risk and return are being packaged into the consensus layer by pushing changes that do not strictly require an update to consensus. This is being defended by mounting a political campaign to paint the actions of dissenters from the above as all the evidence required in order to negate their position as reasonable.
Recall why we are here; Political control over cryptocurrency development brings us the elements of government monetary management that have the most risk - potential for corruption and prioritisation of self interest over the success of the system. Therefore, if political control can be exercised over cryptocurrencies, cryptocurrencies are concurrently lower value from the perspective of serving their founding purpose as a non correlated asset class to address a repeat of the events of 2008, as directly stated by Satoshi in the genesis block.
The ABC model of six monthly hardforks is dangerous to this goal. This is effectively requiring a complexity weighted saving throw against subversion multiplied by the number of changes to the consensus rules. People have a habit of thinking that they are smarter than they actually are, and then only in retrospect when something from the set of unknown unknowns arrives to raze everything they built, seeing that they made mistakes. The correct solution to this is not to move fast and break things, it is to minimise attack surfaces, and innovate in sheltered coves until the primitives with which you're experimenting are validated properly.
On the other hand, the BTC model of political councils dictating consensus rules containing magic numbers which restrict growth and funnel utility away to subverted and controlled channels uses the logic of the above to surrender the fortress before the battle has even begun. In order that we remain conservative in our changes, we should move all of our utility bearing transactions to layers which are transparently vulnerable to subversion, and allow the consensus rules for the subversion resistant chain to remain in a completely dysfunctional state forever, because otherwise we risk dysfunction in the chain.
There is enormous amounts of innovation in the internet space and on top of ipv4 as a protocol, but ipv4 itself is a static, reliable rock, with many multi decade old devices having stacks which reached stability before they themselves were prototypes. This keeps the risk profile for innovations in the internet space away from the base protocol level and allows unlimited experimentation higher in the stack. I believe this is the central value of the position taken by Coingeek and nChain presently and due credit to them for properly understanding this and sponsoring a smart contract platform with a 5m GBP bounty to fulfil that demand without making changes to the underlying consensus rules of the platform. If you can meet a desirable goal without risking everything, you should do that.
Ideally, the entire point of having a trustless decentralised monetary instrument is that devolving to politics is unnecessary, and therefore political deflection is at best beside the point, or at worst an attempt to distract from the point by shiny objects that appeal to human senses of importance like whom to trust and who is good and bad. Once again, the focus needs to be unerringly on what is correct, not who is backing it or the absence of who is backing it. Representative democratic political structures are provably the wrong model, because if they were the right model we wouldn't be in this business to begin with.
Because a person is socially inept, or even toxic, does not mean they are wrong. And by extension, because they are sociable, good natured and politically savvy does not mean that they are right. And it is being right which is most important. And what is right from the perspective of what the past ten years have validated for us is that the basic primitives of the Bitcoin based blockchain work. We know the variables and how they affect the operation of the system, a lot of tampering with those variables simply reduces the awareness we have of the space within which we are operating.
Six month scheduled hardforks and unnecessary consensus layer changes should be recognised for the costs they are, not treated as if they were unquestionably the correct path forward. And in light of the fact that we know that they are costs, those costs should be justified in context. I believe a decent case could be made to justify the costs of CTOR for example given that it heavily optimises block propagation, which is a necessary undertaking for the continued scaling of the system, but I'm hard pressed to find a similar justification for OP_DSV, which appears by contrast to be an unnecessary risk.
I also believe people are potentially interpreting conflict and the preparedness to engage in a hash war as a dispute resolution mechanism as markers of those who engage in this behaviour being bad actors. Recall that the very reason we're in this situation right now as a minority stake in the space pioneered by the values and ideas we champion, is because the majority control of the hashrate was unprepared to actually use that hashrate as a genuine dispute resolution mechanism to break the opposing view. An opposing view which, looking back over the developments of the past year, it is fairly uncontroversial to state was as wrong as we said it was from the beginning, if not more. This is much like having the world's most powerful army and surrendering to the other side's demands because they paid you off. It is not something that should be held up as a successful model for dispute resolution.
An army that won't fight is not an army at all. Strongly believing that your position is the correct one, and being prepared to suffer consequences temporary loss in order to continue to hold that valuable signal in a visible way to all market participants is the legitimate purpose of proof of work.
In conclusion, I would encourage people not to be distracted from the long term goal of what we've been building here for the past decade. An escape from a system which failed, and through which massive monetary parasitism has taken place across the world. Both the armour and the weapons that ensure that escape must be viewed from the perspective of an adversarial technical analysis of how effective they are, because there can be no doubt about the extent to which the interests that would propagate and extend that parasitism will go in order to negate the structure which successfully defends from it. That structure will endure based on the cryptographic, economic, and mathematical principles upon which it rests. It will not do so based upon the quality of the character or likeability of the people who rely upon it to do so.
Don't be afraid. The testing of these weapons and armour in anger are necessary, otherwise they are nothing but bluffing apparatus, and if all you have is a bluff, no real dispute resolution is possible.
I won't tell people what they should believe or what they should choose. I can see merits to both sides of the equation and I will definitely not be going all in on one side or the other. I believe that the problem is fundamentally based in people being distracted from actually understanding the means and the ends of the arms and armour being tested here.
Don't get distracted. Deeply understand what is going on at the level below the circus sideshow of political partisanship and personality analysis. If you can do that, you are already ahead of 95%+ of the market.
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