Bitcoin, as a protocol, needs no authority. That’s what makes it valuable. Core devs are certainly not an “authority”, they are not unified behind anything and spend most of their time disagreeing with each other.

Actually writing good code to solve a problem is 90% of the approval process, for example.

If BU devs were great engineeers, and contributed replay-safe hard fork code that scaled with user capability using a non-gameable metric of some kind… then guess what: we’d have on-chain scaling today.

No amount of “lukejr objection” could compete with a provable damn good solution. Unfortunately EC is a broken idea and BU an poor implementation at that. Most of the hundreds of actual engineers that work on Bitcoin agree here.

Certainly, Bitcoin Classic was *much closer* to being accepted by a large portion of core devs. So much so that segwit included a 2MB effective block size.

BIP100 is broken as well: miner dictated sizes are simply not correct scaling because miners will have misaligned incentives. BIP103 is probably fine… and if someone submitted a pull req for it that was a conservative schedule and clean implementation… it would probably get approved today.

Personally, I’m gunning for “user voting” using a proof of stake mechanism for soft fork activation.