You should not have stopped reading. Brian is entirely correct about the whole situation, the only shame being that he didn't say these things publicly (and take corresponding action) 18 months ago.
The key thing to realise is this. Whilst the remaining Bitcoin Core developers (really: Blockstream) like to present their alternative plans like Lightning as tradeoff-free "solutions", the reality is that their proposed alternatives to the Bitcoin block chain are not launched or even close to launching, are developing extremely slowly, are missing huge chunks from their basic design and even if we assume they find answers to those problems and do actually launch something - the design itself is in no way "perfection" and has very serious unanswered critiques. It is very likely, in my view and the views of others, that their new system would actually be worse than Bitcoin, not better.
Thus driving Bitcoin into a brick wall at high speed because they prefer to believe in vapourware is not perfectionism, it's just idiocy. You don't need to be a businessman to understand that.
In short, they're in the grip of the nirvana fallacy:
> The number of lines of code that need to be written for this across the entire industry will be several orders of magnitude more than a scaling solution of changing 1MB blocks to 2MB blocks. This was explained to core developers at the conference and it didn’t seem to change their opinion of what the best short term solution was to scaling.
Aka, the author knows the day to day challenges of writing core better than the core developers. I believe reading the piece only validated my original heuristic.
The key thing to realise is this. Whilst the remaining Bitcoin Core developers (really: Blockstream) like to present their alternative plans like Lightning as tradeoff-free "solutions", the reality is that their proposed alternatives to the Bitcoin block chain are not launched or even close to launching, are developing extremely slowly, are missing huge chunks from their basic design and even if we assume they find answers to those problems and do actually launch something - the design itself is in no way "perfection" and has very serious unanswered critiques. It is very likely, in my view and the views of others, that their new system would actually be worse than Bitcoin, not better.
Thus driving Bitcoin into a brick wall at high speed because they prefer to believe in vapourware is not perfectionism, it's just idiocy. You don't need to be a businessman to understand that.
In short, they're in the grip of the nirvana fallacy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy