Regarding the hard fork/scalability issue: I have never seen so much controversy regarding the way to deal with a problem in bitcoin within the bitcoin community.
You guys saying it's a "Solved problem" or one with an obvious solution?
But what I really don't like about it is there hasn't been any real discussion. Gavin thinks everything will be fine, so it is. I work in tech and know processors really well. Compute scaling has slowed down and will further slow down, there are only so many cores that can be feed data to process. But the real issue is network, network does not double every 2 years.
I've been so bothered by it that I've started to contemplate building an affordable AWS node configuration that refuses to propagate the hard fork blocks and open that up. If enough people started such nodes then miners would see that the new blocks propagate more slowly and maybe stick to older blocks out of self interest.
Gavin's upgrade cycle requires 80% of blocks over 1000 block period to be new blocks, so if you can get a few pools to opt-out you can block the upgrade.
How about using your energy to offer a solution. Sticking your finger in the eye of the process is counterproductive. It seems that the most productive people in Bitcoin are offering solutions and getting conversations started. Without Gavin coding and testing the very large blocks we would not be talking about it or working toward a solution.