Is deadalnix testing true Nakamoto consensus?

I’ve traditionally been against IFP — hated it last year — but I am waffling more and more in favor.

I feel that Amaury’s line of thinking is:

“I’m freaking tired of begging for donations, never having enough money to hire anyone, always having to justify the time we spend on some features and not others — having to explain why we can’t diverge more from Bitcoin Core. If someone donates I need to make sure I send them a ‘Thank You’ card or they’ll be offended. It’s not sustainable to build money for the world on a pack of volunteers unsure if they’ll raise enough to feed their families. The demands on infrastructure are high, the community believes it magically gets done with a few lines of code and we don’t do enough. Either we make sure it’s a properly funded project, or I think I’m done…it’s hard enough to get developers involved, it’s even harder to get damn good ones…”

I may be completely wrong on that — only one person (or team) can confirm or deny…I’m theorizing.

What’s interesting is that he’s giving up his last 3 years’ work to test true Nakamoto consensus. Thus far he’s not acting like CSW/Calvin by threatening to destroy competing chains or saying there will be no split — in fact picking up the ASERT DAA in fact means the split is optional and voted on by miners explicitly instead of forcing a chain split which would happen with competing DAAs. If ABC loses this hash war, my suspicion is that they hang in the towel and go work on other things.

Historically miners tend to be conservative to avoid splits, makes sense since they don’t want to be on the losing chain and lose revenue. The game theory is advantageous to mine the more restrictive chain to avoid the split. That said this is a little different since it’s more profitable (especially over time) to the miner to break ranks. Do I mine where I get 8% more $$ but this chain might cause a split? Or do I mine and lose 8% but this has the highest probability of not splitting.

I suspect there will be a mining meeting where several of the largest miners will make their decision and signal in either direction as a way of avoiding a split..

Do I, bitcoinnobody, truely care if the miners pay developers? I only gain quality from this change, I don’t see how I lose outside of slight decrease to security through decreased hash. BCH hash rate is already horribly low and vulnerable to attacks so knocking it down 10% isn’t really that great an impact to security. Every great leader takes a stand at some point, every great leader has to make ultimatums at some point in time — is deadalnix a great leader? IDK, but I don’t interpret him taking a stand as being a dictator who thinks he owns the community, I believe he’s trying to be a leader and do what he sees is the right thing here, trying to do what he sees is the hard decision/hard move to make it a successful project. To quote Bill Adama — sometimes you need to roll the hard 6.

It’s in most people’s best interest (50/50 for miners, +quality, -profit) to follow and implement IFP and switch the conversation to be around governance instead of voicing against it and losing a very devoted and damned good dev.