it's really a simple thing. DO WE NEED IT? Is the current limit affecting us or not? Have we reached a point where it is not enough?
The answer depends upon whether a system is centralized or decentralized. When Psy's Gangnam Style "broke" the download counter on YouTube the developers could easily upgrade it after the event, even though they saw it was going to happen. Centralized system, fixed in one place. Very easy!
With Bitcoin, the software is being run on many thousands of computers, owned by thousands of different people who have different opinions, speak different languages, have different priorities. If this change is delayed until it is obvious it is needed, then
everyone has to upgrade, at once. Very messy!
Remember that a YouTube counter is nothing important, but if large numbers of YouTubers were waiting hours or days to see a video then the service becomes total crap. That is the equivalent to the dismal PR scenario being faced here.
it's really a simple thing. DO WE NEED IT? Is the current limit affecting us or not? Have we reached a point where it is not enough?
Today no but properly done a hard fork is a 6-9 month process. Hell it almost took that long for P2SH. We are roughly 35% to 40% of max capacity and txn volume over the last year (in a major bitcoin decline) still doubled. Over a longer period of time it has grown more like 3x to 5x per year. Waiting till 100% of blocks are 1MB and there is a 50,000 txn backlog is probably the wrong time to start discussing the issue.
Thank you both for your answer. Based on that i think it is prudent to lay the ground work for expansion and explain it for what it is,
evolution, not a hard fork. Hard fork just has a bad ring to it and is mostly used to explain
fixing something broken with the system . I think this is a good step forward.
About space on HDD, the question becomes, do you prefer to have an extra 100GB of sauce or run your own node? The vast majority of users are now on lite clients so they are not affected, but if you can run a full node now then you already have the infrastructure to handle the
expansion.