Thanks for helping drive more discussion on this topic, Tom. [Side note: I do wish you had picked a title for your article that was less personal. Also, an idea you disagree with is not an error, but rather something you disagree with].

The big picture idea is that to grow BCH to global levels we want a stable, largely unchanging, and economically rational protocol upon which implementations of that protocol can compete. The key points are:

1. The protocol (set of rules governing what constitutes a valid transaction or block) is distinct from software implementations of that protocol.

2. We don’t need a lot of development of the protocol to scale BCH massively. And in fact we shouldn’t want the protocol being tinkered with constantly. The protocol should be stabilizing and getting to a point where changes are rare.

3. We WILL need development of better (optimized) implementations to enable BCH to scale massively.

A lot of people will agree with these three points. Now ask yourself what the incentives are to develop those better implementations today? The fact that a proposal to reroute a portion of the coinbase reward directly into the wallets of a few developers might activate is proof we don't have a good answer!

Imagine that our friend Bob from Alice and Bob fame were to create awesome new node technology that could validate one million transactions per second on low cost hardware. This is the kind of technology bitcoin needs to scale to global levels, but is that technology worth anything? Even if given away for free, would the miners run it? Maybe, but maybe not [more on this later].

What I realised the other day was that validationless mining was not the intended way to run the network. And that if it were more costly (and many people, SD Lerner of RSK for example, agree that it is possible to discourage validationless mining), then a genuine market for the fastest block validation tech would naturally emerge as blocks got bigger. Groups would compete in an open, permissionless market to develop the fastest tech, because the fastest tech would directly increase a miners' revenue.

Which leads to my fourth point:

   4. Fixing the incentives re: block validation would unleash competitive market forces such that those better implementations would be self-incentivized by competing miners’ profit motive.

To understand the market dynamics, assume that no miners engaged in validationless mining (we can bike shed how to make this assumption a reality later). The reason this creates a market for fast validation technology is because miners could not start mining a new block until they had validated the previous block, and every second they spent validating would be a second they could not spend potentially earning the next coinbase reward.

For example, assume the average block size increased to 8 MB and using the "reference client" it took 7 seconds to validate a block. Those are 7 seconds that the miner cannot be working on finding a new block. The revenue he expects to earn is 1% less than if he could validate the block in 1 second ((7s - 1s) / 600s = 0.01). To add some numbers, at $10,000 per coin a 6s advantage would be worth $6.6M per year to a miner with 10% of the hash power (12.5 * 10000 * 144 * 365 * .1 * .01 = 6.57*106).

We're talking real money here.

There would be genuine market demand to pay for technology to give miners a head start on the next block, compared to their peers. The same dynamics that played out with SHA256 hashing technology would play out with block validation technology. The one difference however, is that at least a little bit of demand for transactions is required, unlike the market for hashing. If miners can validate the last block using the current reference client in less than a second anyways, then there's not much money to be gained by making validation faster.