Maxwell et al&#x27;s position is nothing so high-minded. The real crux of the debate here is whether Bitcoin should begin requiring users to send a substantial fee to the miner that verifies a given transaction now (no change to block size) or later (block size increase solves it now, but the problem will definitely occur when the network stops awarding miners with newly-minted coins, once there&#x27;s ~22 million BTC in existence).<p>People who&#x27;ve primarily invested in the mining infrastructure obviously want the fees to go up now. People who&#x27;ve invested in more customer-facing elements of the bitcoin ecosystem want the fees to stay low as long as possible so that adoption isn&#x27;t deterred by the necessity of including a substantial fee whenever you send a bitcoin transaction.<p>The technicalities of the bitcoin platform have played out such that those who don&#x27;t want the size of blocks to grow have a disproportionate number of votes. <i>Most</i> users and <i>most</i> bitcoin companies want BIP 101, but they&#x27;ve been outvoted by the interest group that wants to start collecting rents on their mining power ASAP. In human terms, it&#x27;s like land owners finding a loophole that allows them to vote 10x more than non-owners. I don&#x27;t believe that was ever part of the intention of Satoshi, but the way Bitcoin&#x27;s difficulty mechanism works has entrenched it as a very real problem that probably can&#x27;t be circumvented.