Whether we like it or not, Bitcoin simply cannot hardfork while a large part of the community does not consent to it.
how would you even measure how much of the community
does consent?
i'm beginning to think a hard fork is completely impossible, except maybe for the narrow scenario where SHA-256, ECDSA or similar are broken.
maybe immutability of consensus is not worth breaking. especially when the best we seem to have to measure it is meaningless miner votes and node counts. fuck a democratic vote, especially ones that can be gamed.
i dont care about miner votes for soft forks. they can do that anyway regardless of anything we do. but for change/removal of consensus rules....no.
The best idea I know of today, would be to have an off-chain stake polling system, where coin-holders can indicate consent by a specially-designed signed message.
Probably we would also need interested parties to fund Google ads and similar to promote awareness of the new polling system, to ensure the majority of UTXOs mark their consent or dissent.
If 99% of polled stake consents to the hardfork, and a sufficient % of UTXO value participates in the polling, it'd probably be safe to move forward.
A safe hardfork can also be done which leaves old nodes "locked" rather than vulnerable to attack.
This protects any nodes that neglect/forget to upgrade in time, and can be designed such that if they really want to dissent too late, they can add a simple one-liner to bypass the "lock-out".
Sounds awesome, but remember one of the key point of cypherpunk bitcoin is "privacy". Nobody should be forced to take part in some political public demonstration. Besides, involving google?! wtf man. Why not directly mark the bagholders with some veal blood already?
Also, at what threshold do you consider the "polled stake" view (which may be as high as 99%!! omg) to overcome the whole bitcoins at stake?