Clash of the node paradigms for the BTC 'community'! - Taproot activation options bringing this matter to a head again.

One of the fascinating things about how the block size debate played out was that one of the first 'forks' we had was a diverging of opinions of 'who is in charge' of Bitcoin.

For Satoshi, when every wallet was a mining node, CPU power was the means of 'voting' for or against changes. There was then a period when mining got separated physically but where miners were still considered to be an integral part of the the community. Developers took a lead (e.g. for an emergency hard fork) but everyone was assumed to be on the same side. It was, however, acknowledged that minors could theoretically go against 'users' and u/RustyReddit pretty much sums up how I always saw it and still do: "...miners are most directly vulnerable to the economic majority of users: in a fork they have to pick sides continuously knowing that if they are wrong, they will immediately suffer economically through missed opportunity cost. Of course, economic users are ultimately in control.".

Then with the block size debate, one of the many small-blocker narratives that was pushed was that of miners being evil and the enemy of bitcoin which morphed into the idea that miners are merely the servants or workers of the noble Bitcoin user who en-masse with their Raspberry-nodes are the 'true bitcoiners' who ought (and do) say what goes^1.

Long story short, this is how it played out: by playing chicken with the miners, led by u/luke-jr, the BIP148 army, by implementing a UASF node implementation that would, in the event of the miners not conceding, cause a fork without replay protection and with serious risks of re-orgs, 'forced' the miners to signal for and to implement Segwit. Ever since then, the accepted BTC-maxi narrative² is that these 'champions' stopped the evil miners from blocking Segwit which, proof-of-hat told us is what the 'community' wanted (and nobody wanted big blocks either because apparently there was never an argument).

Roll on to today and we're seeing it happen again. No-nuance Luke, whilst still maintaining that developers have no power, is pushing a proposal that allows him (and his maxi devotees) to maintain their belief that the 'true, node-running bitcoiners' ultimately have the power. (From what I understand, LOT=TRUE basically says if the miners don't agree to what 'is ethical and has sufficient community support'^3, the 'noble node users' will threaten to throw the toys out of the pram again unless the miners concede). The irony is that nobody is really objecting to Taproot! But the combination of having soft-fork-whatever-the-cost-AND-NEVER-A-HARD-FORK as a red line and with the challenge of trying to find workarounds to that inflexibility was inevitably going to lead them to this dilemma again.

At least I'm watching from the side lines this time :)**

¹ See the comments in this thread to see the latter-day prevelance of this attitude

² This re-writing of history is repeated adnauseum by twitter trolls

³ I guess his Jesus back-channel gives him this info because he doesn't certainly doesn't approve of voting or signaling (unless, of course, everyone is signaling for what according to luke-jr 'is ethical and has community support').