Civil engineer: Hey, Boss. Traffic on the bridge is increasing by 50% per month. Shouldn't we widen it?
Bureaucrat: Ha! That bridge has excess capacity. If traffic gets too high, we'll just increase the tolls. Most of those schmucks don't really need to go anywhere anyway.
Civil engineer: Do we know that for sure? What if there is an evacuation or something?
Bureaucrat: That bridge was intentionally designed with low capacity to prevent invasions! Widening it would be a dangerous departure from historic bridge operations.
Civil Engineer: Aren't bridges supposed to be used to facilitate travel?
Bureaucrat: Yes, but only the right sort of travel. That's for me to decide! If traffic gets too heavy, and tolls get too expensive, the people can use buses. Too many single passenger cars anyway.
Civil engineer: Do you own a bus company?
Bureaucrat: Purely coincidental! I'm just guarding against bridgebuilder centralization.
Civil engineer: I see. No conflict of interest there. What's the name of your company anyway, Busstream?
Bureaucrat: BridgestreamTM, Smartass.
Bureaucrat: Ha! That bridge has excess capacity. If traffic gets too high, we'll just increase the tolls. Most of those schmucks don't really need to go anywhere anyway.
Civil engineer: Do we know that for sure? What if there is an evacuation or something?
Bureaucrat: That bridge was intentionally designed with low capacity to prevent invasions! Widening it would be a dangerous departure from historic bridge operations.
Civil Engineer: Aren't bridges supposed to be used to facilitate travel?
Bureaucrat: Yes, but only the right sort of travel. That's for me to decide! If traffic gets too heavy, and tolls get too expensive, the people can use buses. Too many single passenger cars anyway.
Civil engineer: Do you own a bus company?
Bureaucrat: Purely coincidental! I'm just guarding against bridgebuilder centralization.
Civil engineer: I see. No conflict of interest there. What's the name of your company anyway, Busstream?
Bureaucrat: BridgestreamTM, Smartass.
Awesome post, BJA!
Epic, classic. Well-crafted rhetoric manifesting good faith is often more persuasive than bare facts and logic. Humans "reason" almost entirely by analogy, so this is a most effective way to make your point. The analogy flows easily, and neither is it labored, nor does it beg extension to a reductio.
Thermos' censorship on reddit and here only worked for awhile.
Now that we are getting closer to the limit where everyone will feel real pain from the artificial limit, more and more people are noticing the problem.
The rampant censorship that worked for the Blockstream team works less and less as more people start to ask why we are not doing the obvious thing we all understood would be done years ago. You can't censor everyone.
Core has stated over and over again they will not raise the 1MB limit (which Satoshi and everyone agreed would be raised for years). They even just reiterated this yesterday. This is both absurd and will not stand for the larger market. I won't be surprised if in 1 year from now no one is running core and Bitcoin as moved on to other implementations that better reflect the vision.