What hard fork did you think I was talking about? According to MP , tvbcof, et. al. many miners would not switch to the new 20M fork.
I never said anything one way or another about that and never thought much about it until about 20 seconds ago. Now that I do, however, it is kind of interesting...
I've heard (but don't know) that some outfits are shutting down their hashing due to being in the red (which, as I've said multiple times, is an almost inevitable situation which we must assume will occur from time to time no matter what the price, fees, blocksize, whatever due to simple economics and supply/demand.) Those blinking off must be pools who own most of their own gear because it should not cost much to run a pool generally and if you can find a few miners who will hash for you (for whatever reason) then why not keep running?
This means that there are idle resources which can power up. Let's guesstimate that 95% of miners are straight up good corporate citizens and who appropriately love Big Brother and The Bitcoin Foundation. They'll upgrade to 'gavincoin' like they should and keep right on hashing (and honor the appropriate red-lists when they come out.)
This leaves the other 5%. Some of these will hash on bitcoin-legacy.org (domain free to a good home, BTW.) Maybe the BTC they get will be worth less, and maybe there is a better chance that they'll be worth almost nothing compared to the state approved GVC [gavcoin|govcoin],
but they'll win a lot more of them since the difficulty will plummet.bitcoin-legacy will have to live under the Sword of Damocles having only a minority of the world's sha256, but there are probably some kludgy protections against some of the mischief which could be wrought upon it through attack though.
You know what? A light, tight, and defensible Bitcoin core is exactly what 'sidechains' needs, and sidechains have the potential to attract a great deal of sha256 since they would be created by-and-for autonomous entities who simply need the benefits of a solid exchange currency. Here's an idea. The so-called 'mpcoin' could patch in the SPVP op-code which would benefit sidechains (and others) and leave the gavin-bloat behind as a play for resources.
Here's to living in interesting times.
Apologies for thinking you were in that camp originally defending MP. I too would like to see a side chain demonstrated on testnet, but am skeptical of its concept. I'll remain agnostic until it is released as an open source. Until then, I am perfectly okay with altcoins handling local currency needs and Bitcoin serving as reserve currency. I still think it should increase tps somehow to be taken seriously as a payment system. Until an argument for low tps finds traction, it's hard to take it seriously.