What are a few direct and indirect costs of the “block size debate”?

[monsterer]

The blockchain is the consensus for changes - miners vote by choosing a fork to mine on

[Samupaha]

Tim Swanson has written a good blogpost.

Bitcoin doesn't have a consensus mechanism for blockchain parameters so it's users and developers have to spend a lot of money and time to fight what should be done.

This is one reason why I think Bitshares is superior to Bitcoin.