Falkvinge: Impressions of the Satoshi Roundtable

Falkvinge has this excellent writeup from the Satoshi Roundtable. I recommend reading it in it's entirety, but here is the best quote from it:

I find it really, really frustrating that you have a room full of otherwise hyperintelligent people, who were told in very clear terms by the Chinese miners what those miners want about a year ago (a hardfork increasing the max blocksize limit for the present type of transactions to at least 2 megabytes), and today, you have the same people asking in frustration why Chinese miners are not adopting segwit when those miners said in bright blinking cleartext a year ago what it is they want, and it is not segwit. The lack of understanding the customer perspective comes across not just as substandard, but appalling to the level of downright confusing.

My biggest concern for the last half year is that we're like heading towards the capacity wall, and we're getting absolutely nowhere. It's like a ship heading towards the rocks at full speed, and everyone discussing weather it's best to turn to the right or to the left, or weather the rock is actually dangerous or not instead of turning that rudder now. Falkvinge seems to share my concerns:

The conclusion from this meeting appears to be to do mostly nothing and just expect segwit to activate, possibly lowering the activation threshold (which would not go over well at all). I find that disappointing, because it means that 44 weeks from now, when segwit has definitely failed to activate (when the activation window closes), there will be a flurry of confused activity as what to do next. So in 52 weeks, we’ll be at another Satoshi Roundtable with absolutely no progress at all, if this is the only path worked on.

And yet, surprisingly enough:

After this meeting, I’m very bullish on bitcoin’s future. There’s one thing I believe in more than ideas, and that’s people. Specifically, people with the ability to execute those ideas — and there’s a ton of them here. They’re not going to let bitcoin die silently with a whimper, but something will happen to resolve this deadlock, and it’s going to happen sooner rather than later with all this energy around.