Not fatal to Bitcoin at all, nowhere close to it. Fatal to Core maybe. The key issue is the consideration for user choice, and Core is trying to limit choice for its users, so like you said, conscientious users will just switch. The fact that they are silencing debate and claiming that most bitcoiner voices don't matter to the discussion, and that ethics doesn't matter to the discussion, shows that their heads are not in the right place. I would not use mission critical software from people who are that arrogant. So the Core devs are rightfully getting a lot of scrutiny.
Discussion
I agree with all your points and am not defending core. I was more thinking of posts I’ve seen where ppl say things like it turns bitcoin into a worthless altcoin.
Yeah completely agree, that's not true at all, but it may lean sightly in that direction if a lot of users unknowingly put this code into play, or at least that's their fear.
In truth it might even be beneficial from a practical point of view. I'm still trying to learn more about the exact technicals and what economic incentives surround them, but it looks like the proposed change would decrease spam slightly in the long run, or make it more hardware space efficient. Transactors still have to pay per byte of OP_RETURN data, so incentives are still gonna be relatively tame after this.
But because these changes can have a significant impact like that, because they are so consequential, and because the Core team obviously thinks it's consequential, then it is a legit topic for debate! So the people making claims about turning it into a shitcoin are either being hyperbolic, assuming too much, or missing the real point that this is worth considering and debating amongst bitcoiners and the Core team are being intellectually dishonest.
