For people who have not been following along, the Bitcoin block size debate has been very intense and pulled out a lot of interesting psychology from the Bitcoi

For people who have not been following along, the Bitcoin block size debate has been very intense and pulled out a lot of interesting psychology from the Bitcoin community. Most of the core devs of Bitcoin are strongly opposed to increasing the blocksize to 8mb. 2 people in particular, Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen, have been making very strong political pushes to get the majority of Bitcoin users to favor their block size limit increase proposals, and it appears that they have largely been successful. Everyone has an opinion on the block size debate, and it has become clear that politics are very important to Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a complicated and delicate protocol, and having a qualified opinion on something like the blocksize debate likely requires around a year of studying the academic properties of Bitcoin. Most people don't realize this, and hold their own opinion in high esteem. In many ways, this would be similar to non-cryptographers engaging in debates about key scheduling in AES - it takes a lot of education before you are really qualified to make an opinion. Unlike AES however, with Bitcoin most people believe that they have a qualified opinion, and actively engage in debate, religiously clinging to certain ideas without properly grasping their full implications. Perhaps even more interesting is all of the drama and chaos on /r/bitcoin. Right now there are posts with 93% upvotes requesting that the moderators be replaced. The comment threads have lots of brigading, trolling, loudmouthing, and occasional spurts of academic discussion. There are many accusations of the moderators censoring discussion that opposes their viewpoint on the subject. The moderators have been very active in deleting posts. Certainly many of the deletions were of garbage comments, but there also seems to be abuse-of-power happening. Certainly there are many people trying to be as disruptive as possible, and deleting their comments only results in more assertions of censorship. One big controvertial decision by the moderator team was to censor all posts relating to Bitcoin-XT, a client that runs code which will hard-fork Bitcoin after reaching 75% miner-usage. The two biggest proponents of the block size increase are responsible for XT, and censoring posts about XT seems synonymous to censoring topics about the block size. 'Off-topic' really doesn't seem like an appropriate label. The behavior of proponents of both sides of the debate has been abysmal. Something in Bitcoin is broken, and it's not just related to the block size limit. The decision making process, and 'social consensus' process as a whole, needs improvement.