Yeah that's my concern, because if you start blocking accounts with softforks just because they are posting data to the blockchain, then the blockchain is 100% broken.  Witnesses don't get to decide which operations have value and which ones don't.  You pay the network cost to transact, you get to post the operation.  End of story.  

What if I start posting books to the blockchain or code from GitHub?  Does a witness get to come along and tell me: "no! that doesn't have value!"  ??? If they do it shows the entire system is broken. 

Tbh there's a much easier way than soft forks. Node operators (RPC nodes), which are the true gateway between the interfaces and the blocks, can easily implement a filter to block accounts which cause heavy load (higher than average cost, spammers, attackers).

That type of "blacklist" can be maintained without need for a softfork. And even be implemented by multiple node operators as well.

You don't like it when I just make shit up off the top of my head as it relates to your field? 
#  💩 Party pooper! 💩

Vote selling got hamstrung by free downvotes.  
No one is willing to buy votes because the content will just get downvoted for free. 
So yeah, whales would like to sell their votes, but no one is buying. 
Rather than sell votes for a discount, it is more profitable to just curate content as intended. 

There's a good chance a lot of whales/orca's simply give away their RCs for free so the plankton can transact, especially if the reason everyone is trying to transact is some new killer dapp.  However, when RCs get really really scarce they will be worth a lot of money.  Of course at that point the things that can be accomplished with RCs are also worth a lot of money so the cost of RCs will likely be vastly mitigated by network synergy.  Should be interesting. 

Unfortunately patents stifle creativity and innovation and claim to do the opposite.  Intellectual property will be outdated in the future.  No one is going to own IP; such is crypto.  The value of open systems and collaboration is too strong.  I wish him the best though regardless of the inevitable outcome.  Hopefully he can sell the IP to a corporation for a small fortune. 

Not really sure about how this relates to voice. 
Every blockchain has a cost to transact, even if it is a "free" resource. 
They would be too easy to DDOS otherwise. 

Also, I'm pretty sure no one can choose to pay more RCs for something just yet.  The cost of things is currently a standard flat-fee for everyone across the board.  The witness nodes simply decide what operation they are going to include and what they won't.  You bring up a good reminder that we will probably have to program in this type of auction system. 

Yes exactly, except in this situation I kinda think we should use the weapon and then adapt to the problem more quickly because we actually have devs and we need to do it eventually anyway just for legitimate scaling purposes. 

Also it is a decentralized decision to use the weapon.  Anyone with RCs on Steem can start filling up blocks with garbage. I was testing it out last night:

https://steempeak.com/test/@edicted/rc-test

I added 1MB to the Steem blockchain last night and I wake up in the morning and almost have all my RCs back.  I only have 1333 Steem Power.  Seems like a single whale could start adding 50KB to every block if they wanted to. 

Ah, nice work. 

>([40KB] this is a limit one account can throw every 3 sec)

That's not quite accurate.  It's pretty easy to go up as high as 50KB.  I was just doing it. 

The max block size is 65KB so if 2 accounts tried to post 40KB on the same block one of them would get denied or simply bumped to the next witness. 

Imagine like millions of SP though and how much data could be pumped into the blocks... might even regenerate RCs faster than you lose them with enough Power.  Probably better to just stay constructive and build useful stuff though. 

Because right now they are throwing all that bandwidth away because it is worthless.  When it becomes worth something all the whales will stop throwing away their bandwidth and sell it instead (for market price). Competition to get data on the blocks will skyrocket, and the RC costs of operations will spike because the market will be flooded with whale RCs.  Because RCs are now worth > 0 they will get sold on the free market for cheap, so it might end up costing x100 the RC to post something to the blockchain. 

Does this make sense?  I feel like it's still just as convoluted as before. 

If blocks become full then witnesses raise the cost of a tx. The pool then will allow, currently unused, RC to be sold and used the currently is not used. This added RC availability means users will buy the unused RC to bid for their content to make it in a block. This will in turn mean that it takes more RC to get in a block so smaller accounts now need to buy more to get their message out. This will continue compounding to the point where it takes a lot of RC just to get your message out because now the cost of each tx in terms of RC will be multiple times more than it is currently.