Both r/bitcoin and r/btc are terrible. You wont ever get a proper discussion for bigger blocks on r/bitcoin and r/btc has basically turned into a place for bitcoin cash and is not anyway related to bitcoin now. They even celebrate everytime bitcoin price dumps.
The only reason it is contentious is because of the 'core' group who want to profit off of crippling the main chain. If you mean that there should be a more dynamic way of choosing max block size, I agree. If you mean that there is any technical limitation to blocks being orders of magnitude larger, there is a lot of evidence to the contrary and anyone syncing with the chain can tell that it doesn't take much CPU power or bandwidth.
> Both r/bitcoin and r/btc are terrible.
/r/btc is terrible in the same way lots of subreddits become tribalistic, but /r/bitcoin is a truly toxic, censored dictatorship meant to lie to people new to bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. I don't think they are on the same level.
> is not anyway related to bitcoin now. They even celebrate every time bitcoin price dumps.
I don't think that is true at all. /r/btc wants core to no longer be in control, because they have done nothing but lie and censor to try to profit off of crippling something they didn't create or even help build up. The bitcoin cash circle jerk gets obnoxious but it is also a direct reaction to everything people like greg maxwell (nullc on reddit and hacker news) have done.
I actually don't care about nullc or anyone else spreading lies or anything. I just believe that core scaling plan is far more superior to what others have been demanding.
The fact is, there are already two methods of transactions off of the bitcoin chain that have evolved in the face of bitcoin being artificially crippled - other cryptocurrencies and (unfortunately) exchanges.
They even had to delay their release of 0.15.1 for this hard fork.
Are there good communities online for decent bitcoin discussion?
Developers choose which software they want to develop. Users choose which software they want to use. There's no need for a consensus. It's like every other open-source software.
However, When someone makes a new software with new rules (BCH, S2X), users are free to choose it and miners are free to mine it. Miners can't vote which version users should be using, or which version is the correct one. There is no 'correct one'. Miners vote doesn't apply there. There are now multiple blockchains and each one has miners who enforce the rules in that specific blockchain.
If there's a major user base for different versions, then there's a need for distinct names. If a majority of Bitcoin users agree to update to a new version, then it's called a 'consensus hard-fork' and the new version gets to keep the same name (and the old version dies). When the new version is a 'split-fork' (both versions has users), the new version needs a new name and the old version gets to keep its name. Miners don't have a vote in that. It's the users who choose which software they want to use and what they want to call it.
Only problem here is that because BTC mining is so centralized, small chains with same POW-algorithm are vulnerable to attacks. This leads to this situation where miners can potentially coerce users into using their version of the software.
P.s. If someone gains unfair advantage on the blockchain somehow (Blockstream etc.) and users lose confidence in Bitcoin's core developers, the majority of user base will then fork into something else and keep the Bitcoin name. There hasn't been a reason for that yet. I trust the larger Bitcoin community that it will happen if there's a legitimate reason.
Bitcoin Cash and segwit 2x have a major difference: in bitcoin cash there is replay protection (purposefully) and in segwit 2x there is not (also purposefully). Because segwit 2x is a meant to be a hard that kills the other chain off, there IS a correct chain - the chain with the highest proof of work. This is explained in the original bitcoin white paper.
Miners are signalling with an overwhelming majority that segwit 2x will be the chain with the most hash power / proof of work behind it, and because there is no change to the transaction formats, if it gains the majority of hash power, it is considered the valid continuation of the bitcoin blockchain.
As you can see what happened here, 'consensus' means more than just miners.
Miners ARE the bitcoin consensus mechanism. Saying anything different is ridiculous. The miners are signaling 2MB blocks in an overwhelming majority. https://coin.dance/blocks
Blockstream and 'core' are scared that the miners will finally stop using their software and take control back of bitcoin, allowing them to expand it's throughput to what other chains already have. This will alleviate the ridiculous $3-$5 fees to make the smallest transaction. Before 'core' and blockstream decided to suffocate the throughput of bitcoin so that their company could profit off of side channels, fees were a few cents.
> just Jeff Garzik to handle this task.
This is not true at all. First, Jeff Garzik was one of the very early developers of bitcoin before the current crop ousted the original group who wouldn't go a long with their plan. They are the ones that took it from something no one knew about to a working system with millions of users. It isn't only Jeff Garzik working on this task and the 'task' is mostly raising a number from 1 MB to 2 MB. There isn't anything technically difficult about it.
> I think they were soft limits which didnt require a hard fork.
The 1 MB limit was put in place as temporary spam protection and satoshi was very clear about this. Bitcoin HAS hard forked before (and many other coins have hard forked multiple times as planned upgrades that have gone perfectly smoothly).
If you are getting your information from /r/bitcoin you should know that it is HEAVILY censored. They ban anyone who has an opinion they don't like, they grey list comments they don't like, they change the sort order of threads that don't go their way, they keep their moderation logs closed and they have a long list of rules that are arbitrarily enforced as justifications for all their nonsense. Check out /r/btc or any other source of information, but not /r/bitcoin, that place is 100% toxic.
Edit: Every post speaking out about /r/bitcoin usually gets rapid downvotes with no explanation while also getting slowly upvoted over time. This seems to be no exception.