2/5 of the core devs support increasing the blocksize, and of the remaining 3, at least 2 have vested interests in companies/technologies outside of core bitcoin that could stand to benefit from smaller blocksize, eg Blockstream.

Blockstream has to benefit from blocks as large as possible without losing decentralisation and security properties, like everyone else.

The argument that "I understand this and you don't, so you don't get a vote" seems like a lazy way to suppress democratic process. A better alternative is, "This might seem complicated, but really it's not; here's a simple but complete explanation to help you make an informed decision."

If you're a high energy experimental physicist you can say you work on a particle accelerator. That's a machine that makes particles hit into each other really fast, a bit like a super-high-speed game of conkers! When the particles hit together and break apart for a really short time you can see the parts that make them up, and you can learn things about them!

You've now explained what you're doing to an 8 year old! But if you ask the 8 year old whether they think it's a good idea to use Fox-Wolfram moments to partition phase space and suppress the continuum background, like B-factories do, or whether you'll have difficulty determining the centre-of-mass frame due to missing energy? Probably the 8 year old won't have an informed opinion either way.

Or could it maybe, just maybe, be that it is entirely reasonable that it takes years to have sufficient background understanding before an expert can convey the knowledge you need to study for another few months to actually understand something and also have an expert opinion on it?

Politics is about ethics. In this case: the ethical consequences of certain technical choices (under which I include a consideration like 'I will make less money'). (Expert) knowledge of the technical choice itself is mostly irrelevant for those parts of the debate. We can discuss the military merits of e.g. nuclear weapons until kingdom come, but if I'm opposed to them on humanitarian grounds, no amount of technical merits will convince me.

As for the quote, it depends on context. In a context where expert knowledge is necessary to make useful contributions to the debate, there is nothing redeeming in the quote. It merely encourages people to be disrupt it. In the more general context where you ask a researcher to be able to explain his work: of course he should be able to dumb it down. But not for the purposes of subsequently engaging in fruitful discussion with him.

And, I'll additionally argue that technical merits can convince someone opposed on humanitarian grounds, the two are not incomparable, we do these sorts of comparisons just fine in the real world.

You are attempting to modularise the argument in a way I find unpalatable is all, our differences are likely surface deep.

But sometimes things are complicated, and there's no simple but complete explanation...

I do not like statements like that -- it basically says unless you know as much as me (and if you knew as much as me you'd agree with me), you can not have an opinion. It is pretty exclusionary. Most people can get up to speed fairly fast than that if they have access to good information on both pros and cons.

I wouldn't expect Linus to listen to my opinions about the Linux task scheduler.

Why should the Bitcoin community listen to some random guy's unsupported opinions about block size? This isn't about politics or being nice and listening to everyone. This is about making a massively technical choice and it better be made based on solid technical reasoning, not on a desire to be happy and inclusive.

Furthermore, a year is a really silly measurement of time for how long learning something will take. If you have some background knowledge in the field, then most individual blind spots can be cleared up in a month or two of full time study. It took me about 2 months from not knowing how Bitcoin worked to implementing my own cryptocurrency with a novel PoW approach. This stuff isn't that hard.

Totally agreed. Just because you're an expert, that doesn't absolve you from having to make your case.

But the same is true of anyone else, and that necessarily excludes non-experts who will not be able to make their case effectively.

That is the crux of why this is a huge deal, and Linus changing the Linux scheduling algorithm is not a huge deal. People are afraid that Bitcoin is going to break, or meet an obstacle that prevents them from making massive ROI on their speculation, and they have a lot of stake in the game in protecting Bitcoin.

> It took me about 2 months from not knowing how Bitcoin worked to implementing my own cryptocurrency with a novel PoW approach.

"It took me about 2 months from not knowing how cryptographic hashing worked to implementing my own hash with a novel sponge function."

The hard part is not making a cryptocurrency that works when people use it normally. The hard part is making a cryptocurrency that works when people around the world can profit tens of millions of dollars by breaking the cryptocurrency (either abusing the mining, spending coins that don't belong to them, DoS'ing competing miners, etc.)

I don't know which cryptocurrency you made (I tried to look it up via your HN profile, but didn't find anything), but if you get it peer reviewed I imagine that experts will quickly be able to find a reason or two for why it is either broken or uninteresting.

Anyone can make a cryptosystem that they themselves cannot break. Bitcoin is among the most complex and cutting edge cryptosystem we have today. Even in the past few months, several important and severe flaws in Bitcoin have been discovered and fixed.

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015...

https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoin_devlist/comments/3bsw60/upc...

Decisions as seemly small as updating the blocksize limit are enormously nuanced. It changes the entire game theory behind the mining, affects how people will be running validation nodes, and requires a strong understanding of how blocks propagate around the world, and what a nice 'average' block looks like vs. a block that was made maliciously.

> better follow it up with links to a list of the academic papers that one would need to get up to speed

This is a very difficult thing to do, especially because Bitcoin is so new. Much of the important discussion that has happened resides only in mailing lists, blog posts, irc logs, github issues, and forum posts.

But here is a good set of papers to get started:

http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bitcoin/

A smaller, more focused list:

http://bitcoin.ninja/

It will also help if you read the full #bitcoin-wizards log, dating back to around 2013 I believe. There you will find lots of highly technical discussion with links to more discussion and research papers. It's probably got the highest signal to noise ratio of any public discussion.

Even the normal political problems that governments concern themselves with typically have technical aspects as well as their social values aspects, and while democracy can hopefully allow us to take many different peoples ideas of what constitutes the good life into account, we don't expect them all to have a complete understanding of the technical aspects of each decision.

It's quite possible that random guys might have relevant things to say about the values that inform the block size discussion even if they don't understand the details of the technical discussion.

Why not? As an end-user your opinion is very important, you're the one that has to live with the detached decisions that Linus makes regarding the scheduler.

Task scheduling is deeply complicated. Optimising for one set of cases hurts others, so it's an exercise in hard tradeoffs. It also has deep knock.on effects in other parts of the system.

I do not have the expertise to make proper judgements regarding choices in that space. The breadth of knowledge and experience required greatly outstrips my own.

Moreover its a space where subjective experience is the worst possible measure. So my gut feeling as a user is utterly useless in making appropriate technical choices in the space.

I'm pretty sure giving people the time of day is an admirable trait and can teach you many things regardless of their expertise. It's after the fact that you disregard the cruft.

It's like the Republican debates for me, I can't seem to find any common ground with these candidates but then I find a few nuggets that I do like (such as Jeb Bush's funding of crisis birth centers and increasing the adoption rates in Florida through better funding and education for adoption centers. Even if I'm pro choice I think those are good ideas). Of course, the Republican debates are two to three hours long so it's very thankful they're not very often and you need to find the balance so that you're not just wasting your time.

I think it's fair to say that there is no black and white answer to this issue and you really have to go on a case by case basis to maximise your use of the information contained in the people around you.