Whether we like it or not, Bitcoin simply cannot hardfork while a large part of the community does not consent to it.
You seem to recognize exactly that a non-consensus hardfork is not necessary and is potentially damaging, so I remain a bit unclear regarding what fruitfulness comes from your going around polling people in the bitcoin community regarding what kind of scenarios they believe in which a hardfork would be a good thing?
There are real improvements that can be made to Bitcoin with a hardfork.
If the community could come to agreement on it, it would help Bitcoin compete in the near term at least.
Likely, I do not understand technicalities sufficiently; however, I thought that almost all significant changes could be achieve through soft forks, so I remain uncertain why a hardfork would be even needed, unless there was some kind of technical emergency.. such as some kind of bug that allowed a maligned player to steal coins.
In other words, to attempt to rush consensus seems to be an unnecessary (and potentially dangerous and damaging) alteration of bitcoin's governance, rather than attempts at addressing any kind of necessary technical resolution.
The mentioned block withholding attack falls under "allowing ... to steal coins" IMO.
I do agree any rush is unnecessary, and that a safe hardfork is probably impractical at this time (albeit I am trying to find a way to prove myself wrong here, so I can meet the terms I agreed to, but so far no success in doing so).
Well, you were there for the actual discussion of the agreement, but it seems very impractical, and even a bad reading of the actual literal agreement to believe that a pursuit of a hardfork would be necessary prior to verifying how seg wit plays out first.. .
I mean, really, seg wit is not even actually live on the network, yet, so isn't it feasible that seg wit could really cause a lot of the points for an actual hard fork to be mute... (at least regarding to a raising of the blocksize limit for some time to come) and yeah of course, a large number of bitcoin holders would agree that if old coins somehow become more vulnerable due to changes in security or abilities to break cryptography, then those matters are going to be weighed to potentially justify a hardfork rather than a softfork... but also, breaking cryptography is much at the theoretical level, instead of actual demonstrations of such breaks of cryptography occurring, no?
Yes, it was a compromise. I don't see any strong purpose to active pursuit of a hardfork right now, and except that I promised in HK to do so, I otherwise probably wouldn't be.
Of course, nobody else in the community outside of that HK meeting has agreed to do anything, and is free to reject any proposal we come up with.