Segregated witnesses will take a significant amount of time to implement, it will take at least two years before we could even expect this to be implemented throughout the entire ecosystem, which is what would be required in order to bring about this increase.
Another load of FUD further demonstrating your ignorance of technical aspects and your over-reliance on outsiders for insight. You're obviously basing these numbers on Jeff's openly pessimistic outlook which is being challenged by a considerable amount of devs.
The more generally accepted view is that the softwork will take anywhere between 3-6 months. Once activated it provides an immediate 75% increase in transaction capacity.
Moreover Jeff presents a shoddy parallel between multi-sig prevalence and potential future pace of SW adoption by the ecosystem. There are many reasons why this comparison is not particularly accurate but the more important one is that the largest actors in the ecosystem (hosted wallets) who are responsible for a important fraction of current transaction load will have clear economic incentive to move forward ASAP with SW. This will immediately translate into even more headroom for regular transactions.
Furthermore hard forks should be preferred because they act as an important governance mechanism which allows people to protest by not updating their clients thereby splitting the network, this is why I believe Core is so afraid of doing hard forks, this should be embraced as a feature instead of being considered as a flaw within the protocol to be avoided.
Hard forks create a dangerous precedent and potential destruction of the trust that has so far gravitated around Bitcoin since its inception, especially when there is a clear divide and lack of consensus.
The ability for us to compromise using a softfork is a clear win and anyone who does not understand this needs to double check their assumptions.
As a result, segwit allows scaling Bitcoin capacity in a opt-in way. Those who want to take advantage of extra capacity need to expend extra resources, but those who do not want to use the feature (no matter how small that minority is), do not need to expend any extra resources at all. Therefore, censorship-resistance property of Bitcoin remains unchanged.
http://blog.oleganza.com/post/135710722553/how-segregated-witness-is-not-the-same-as-bumpingInstead of trusting any singular organization, we should distribute this power across multiple implementations, this is how mining and nodes are decentralized after all. The same principle should apply to development. So far we have three alternative implementations that support an increased blocksize. Bitcoin Unlimited and XT are both forks of Core so they will continue to take advantage of all of the developments and advances within Core. Btcd has been written from scratch on the other hand, a completely unique implementation, which will also make the network more robust and resilient, since not having a monoculture of implementations would make the Bitcoin protocol more healthy over the long run.
Different implementations are generally helpful except when they challenge the existing consensus rules. I don't see why you even adressed this point since clearly no one is challenging it. It seems your complaint is about a general lack of adoption of these implementations. One doesn't have to look far to understand why it is so.
Have you looked at XT's Github repo lately? The development has stalled while Core continues to innovate. Its lead developer is missing in action and nowhere to be seen. Are you seriously proposing that users run code that is demonstrably lacking in peer-review?
I am starting to think that this is the best solution, there are irronconcielable ideological differences here, that seem irresolvable otherwise, at least this way we will all still have the Bitcoin we want. I also think that this bests reflects the ethos of freedom and decentralization within Bitcoin.
We've been telling you forever to fork off. You dissenters are a minority and nothing else.
If you're not happy with the current development then move forward with your implementations and leave us the fuck alone.
If your code stands up to its own merits it will gain adoption but don't expect us Bitcoiners to be steered in by your political propaganda. No amount of bullshit is going to cover up for your technical ineptitudes.