Careful, what is "reasonable" is what is at issue here. There are legitimate arguments being made on both sides.
The idea is that your wallet commits a number of coins to a payment channel at one hub, and then payments to and from other LN users are routed along payment channels across hubs. This means less blockchain bloat, faster verification (you trust the hub to not sign conflicting transactions, because doing so is proud of fraud valid in court and kills their reputation in 5 seconds) and cheap transactions.
It still needs larger blocks, because adding funds to payment channels and taking funds out of then requires on-chain transactions. With millions of users, 1MB isn't enough.
You also have to get the users to switch, in particular miners and exchanges, so therein may lie part of the answer. But I suspect those people will generally follow what the devs recommend. I thought some of the big Chinese miners had said they would accept switching to 8MB blocks. So why hasn't the switch been made?
Mike Hearn who seems to be the strongest proponent of the XT 'we need larger blocks asap' philosophy and the person who wrote the blog post referenced in the OP is _not_ a core dev as far as I can tell.
I've seen comments to the effect that he has repeatedly tried to gain more influence in Bitcoins direction over several years and some people posit that this is him attempting to do more of the same by forking and taking the majority with him leaving him with a lot more power over 'new' XT core's development. Hard to say how much if any truth there is to that. The things Mike says make a lot of sense to me.
If the XT fork were to succeed it would likely be merged back into the core project.
The majority of developers of wallets, for instance, are for the blocksize increase.
But the majority of bitcoin-core developers are against it. Gavin and Jeff are the only bitcoin-core committers in favor.
This is explained in Mike Hearn's blog post, as linked in his email on this post: https://medium.com/@octskyward/why-is-bitcoin-forking-d64731...
If the hard fork occurs and you are still mining with Bitcoin Core, your node will reject the first new block that is larger than one megabyte in size. At that point there is a risk your newly mined coins will not be accepted at major exchanges or merchants." https://bitcoinxt.software/
What I find intriguing about this in the bigger picture is it begins to answer one of questions from the beginning - how do political decisions regarding the blockchain get made when consensus has failed? And this shows a plausible mechanism for using a compatible fork to let users "vote with their feet".
I wonder if down the road this sort of thing could evolve/devolve into a sort of real block chain politics, e.g. let users incorporate one or more non-core patches into their nodes, and once a patch reaches some majority percentage it activates and forks the chain, perhaps even with a mechanism to allow other nodes to "accept a fork" (i.e. activate the patch in their node) if it wins but otherwise not proactively "vote" for it.
Interesting times.
Let's be precise: it's the miners who are being asked to vote with their feet.
It's also the payment processors, the wallets, and everyone else who connects to the network who needs to validate the larger blocks.
I have no particular opinion on which way this should swing, however it's clear that XT represents far more than just a block size change (and the XT web site even makes this explicit): it is another attempt at gaining increased control of the project, which is also mentioned by the linked Medium article as one of reasons Lightning isn't great for Bitcoin either.
While Mike and Gavin have long been members of the project, in good standing, and with no obvious reasons to doubt them, it's still worth giving a few moments thought to how the project may be impacted in the coming years should this "change in administration" succeed.
Gavin stepped down as lead developer on April 7, 2014. [1]
Most people would call that a year ago, or maybe one and a half years ago (rounding up from one year and four months). You purport to be “simply doing fact corrections” elsewhere in this thread. Misreporting basic periods of time does not jibe well with that assertion.
I would not normally be so pointed in my criticism but there is a strong disinformation and censorship campaign going on around this development fork. While that is happening you would do well to be very careful in what statements and ‘corrections’ you make.
[1] http://www.coindesk.com/gavin-andresen-steps-bitcoins-lead-d...
Gavin is still a core developer. He stepped down from his Leadership position to become "just" a regular core developer.
(I know that Maaku knows this. Just clarifying for the crowd.)
Some people want to change the rules. But some other people don't want them changed. So now we have two sets of people, the Changers (XT) and the Don't-Changers (Core) who will be following different sets of rules.
So their softwares won't play together in places their rules disagree. This will create a "fork" in the ledger histories. If your coins existed before the fork, everyone will see them. But if you transact them in a way that's incompatible with one set of rules, the transaction will only exist on one side of the fork.
So the public will then have to choose which side of the fork to live on. They will probably want to live on the dominant side. Then the losing side will give up and switch!
Bitcoin-XT actually has a few built-in mechanisms to make this transition graceful. It will only deploy the incompatible rules once it has a 75% majority vote, and is thus confident of success.
Practically speaking if you own Bitcoin prior to the fork I believe it means you will then be able to use your coins on both post 'fork' versions. Once the fork happens you will have to decide which version you want to transact on when you receive new coins.
It remains to be seen which version will survive, or if perhaps both versions will.
Coins you hold now are not at risk. You are only at risk if you spend a coin on the Core network sometime after XT takes over 75% of the hashing power and before Core releases an update to bring it in line with XT, and only then if the block your tx ends up in happens to be over 1MB.
The only bitcoin that become unusable in one chain are those that come from a post-fork coinbase transaction.
As in, actual censorship about all blocksize discussion, or just about XT?
The justification for the removal is that Bitcoin XT is an altcoin, and altcoin discussion is not allowed. [2]
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3h424p/why_is_bitc...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3h424p/why_is_bitc...
In practice, this fork only happens if >75% of miners switch to the new software, and I suspect the whole community would quickly abandon the other fork.
