> A mechanism of soft-forking against activation exists. What more do you
want? Are we supposed to write the code on behalf of this hypothetical
group of users who may or may not exist for them just so that they can have
a node that remains stalled on Speedy Trial lockin? That simply isn't
reasonable, but if you think it is, I invite you to create such a fork.
I want BIP 8. And less invitations to fork or provoke people.

> If I believe I'm in the economic majority then I'll just refuse to upgrade
my node, which was option 2. I don't know why you dismissed it.

> Not much can prevent a miner cartel from enforcing rules that users don't
want other than hard forking a replacement POW. There is no effective
difference between some developers releasing a malicious soft-fork of
Bitcoin and the miners releasing a malicious version themselves. And when
the miner cartel forms, they aren't necessarily going to be polite enough
to give a transparent signal of their new rules.

Miners get paid irrespective of rules as long as subsidy doesn't change. You can affect their fees, bitcoin and that should be termed as an attack on bitcoin.

> However, without the
economic majority enforcing their set of rules, the cartel continuously
risks falling apart from the temptation of transaction fees of the censored
transactions.

Transaction fee isn't as expected even if we leave censored transactions in a censorship resistant network. If cartel of developers affect it in long term, there will be a time when nobody wants to mine for loss or less profit.

> Look, you cannot have the perfect system of money all by your
lonesome self.

I agree with this and I can't do the same thing with my local government.

pushd
---
parallel lines meet at infinity?