btw the recent update is a soft fork yet will still go into effect only with 95% hashpower.
Yet XT will hard fork with only 75%.
Trying to fork without consensus is damaging and irresponsible. Bitcoin was designed to prevent a majority forcing their will on a minority (if it comes to that).
I hope the contentious hard fork will not be successful.
It is impossible for a majority to force their will on a minority in Bitcoin, you can simply choose not to run the code. Saying that we must have an absolute consensus is damaging and irresponsible, people will not always be able to agree on everything, unless we had a point of centralized control and authority. Which it seems like some people here think should be Core.
What Core did with the recent hard fork is also rather disgusting, they used the same version number for the blocks as BIP101, they did this on purpose in order to undermine BIP101. This represents a deliberate move by Core in order to circumvent the legitimate decision making process of proof of work.
They should have introduced BIP65 using a hard fork, since introducing it as a soft fork allows them to circumvent the processes of consensus that a hard fork would have necessitated.
Soft forks quash the minority voice. Hard forks allow it to persist.