Why I think hysteria about block size is market manipulation by big buyers
Yesterday I was bored and tweeted that people flood reddit and blogs with concerns about the block limit in order to buy as many coins as possible before July’s halving that will trigger a huge price increase and expose to the whole world how important and valuable Bitcoin has become.
Seriously speaking, I don’t see another explanation for seemingly inconsistent behaviour on part of some people than either outright stupidity or participation in a mild short term conspiracy aimed at supressing the price until the next mining reward drop.
1. If someone’s business model is really at stake, they’d be coding real scalability solutions rather than debating opinions and appealing to authority.
I can understand how respectable Bitcoin businesses such as online exchanges and payment processors earn fees from the users’ activity. They obviously would like to process as many transactions as possible in order to earn as much commission as possible. Nothing wrong with it. However, if that’s really the case, then these companies should really invest into better codebase, improved block propagation techniques, better wallets etc - in order to be able to say “hey, we’ve improved the overall infrastructure and now we can raise the stupid limit” .
However, the only people who actually fix the infrastructure are those who care about long-term value of Bitcoin which is self-consistent and does not need any conspiracy theory to explain.
2. Some people point to ETH pumping as an evidence that people sell BTC for ETH.
This is total bullshit. Ethereum is much harder to scale. Dumping BTC for ETH because of scaling concerns makes no sense.
3. Some think that miner’s hashrate should decide hard fork matters, but yet do not like miner-enforced soft fork that improves Bitcoin in multiple ways
If miners “should” decide some matters, wouldn’t it be easier to just implement whatever you want using their existing powers (soft forks) rather than demanding that they have more power?
These inconsistent arguments can be explained either by total stupidity, by a big conspiracy theory (“USG wants to sabotage Bitcoin”) or by a small conspiracy theory (“Bitcoin is going to eat the world in a few months and we need to win some time to improve our position in it ahead of Chinese/Russians/Americans”).