The letter urges caution and delay on the grounds that hard forks are risky. Let's cut through the fancy wording here and get to the actual points of what is being said:
- Instead of resolving the issue, let's make it someone else's problem so that we don't have to spend money. This is what Segregated Witness does. It allows the miners to make very few changes to their infrastructure at the expense of businesses, who must make expensive and time-consuming modifications to working production code. Segregated Witness should be revealed for what it is: a solution that does indeed provide a small reduction in bandwidth utilization, but which allows miners to spend almost no money on upgrades while rendering everything else that needs to understand bitcoin transactions obsolete.
- Let's create more delays, because a fork will cost us money. Is anyone else struck by the farcical nature of the idea that the signatories are worried about a contentious hard fork? It's ludicrous to believe that any hard fork will ever be non-contentious. Therefore, they suggest that everyone delay, this time for 3 weeks, with the idea that somehow progress will be made then. For miners, this is good business - if there is no fork, then there will never be a risk to their income stream because they might choose the wrong fork.
- Let's all shake hands and talk about the problem for a while longer so that we can come up with solutions that make us money. The more time that is wasted, the better for many of the people signing the letter. A freer chain with large blocks would be a threat to their business models. The best solution for them is to simply attempt to run out the clock - and what better way to do that than to tell people that they should talk with each other until they all get along? Since the most popular ways of communicating are censored, telling people to wait for more discussion is the best way to stall and delay until someone can capitalize on a solution for this fake problem.
The sensible and obvious course of action to anyone who has no money invested is to simply make the size of blocks bigger. I'm struck by how many times I've described this problem to people at the office or at Toastmasters events, who have nothing to do with bitcoin, and they have difficulty understanding what the actual problem is. When I tell them that this issue was artifically added into bitcoin after its launch, they simply ask why it takes years of discussion to change something back to close to the way it worked before. The answer is that there is yet to be a significant incentive for the people in charge to do it. People leaving the system is not significant incentive because that doesn't matter to most of those people.
For now, Chinese mining farms are making a killing with the current system and have no incentive to support anything that disrupts their revenue stream. They are content with supporting the Core because they make more money if transaction fees become unaffordable. They also don't suffer the consequences of an unusable system because they don't actually use it in the way everyone else does. Expanding the size of blocks would cost them money in new servers and greater bandwidth.
If you want to change this, what can you do? Huge mining corporations are interested in profit. Setting up new nodes doesn't make miners any more or less money, so doing so is pointless. The only way to change the status quo is to hit miners in their pocketbook. That's why the best way to force change is to sell out. The bitcoin price needs to crash low enough to create enough panic among miners and investors that they will recognize that they need to change. Faced with that choice, they will either upgrade to bigger blocks, or they will go bankrupt and be replaced by people who realize that big blocks are necessary for bitcoin to recover.
We are very fortunate that markets don't work proportionally. It may be true that big investors hold the majority of bitcoins. Fortunately, if 0.1% of all bitcoin users sold out, the price wouldn't decline by 0.1%. Instead, such an act would create a massive panic that would leave bitcoin's price cratered for an extended period of time. The only way to send a wakeup call to the miners is to push the price so low that investors see millions of dollars wasted in huge warehouses with powered-off ASICs. When that happens, large holders are not going to sit back and allow the huge numbers of bitcoins they purchased in Silk Road auctions become worthless. They will push for a solution that, after deployed, will allow price to recover.
If you want to create real change, stop making token gestures like flooding the network with extra Classic nodes when miners are unwilling to mine Classic blocks. Instead, sell your bitcoins and send a message that a shakeup is needed in the industry. Selling is the most cost-effective way to force real change - and it is far more effective than trying to buy ASICs to outcompete large manufacturers who can mine at a fraction of the cost by locating in cold places next to hydroelectric plants. Plus, price is going to decline anyway if nothing happens, so you might as well get out now to save money. Put your money in altcoins, in stocks (which are low priced now) or in dollars and just wait it out.
I hope that we will see a rapid and sustained decline in bitcoin price, and soon. Being hit in their wallets is the only way that miners are going to be forced to make real change.