Quote from: exstasie on September 14, 2016, 10:49:37 PM

Quote from: Yakamoto on September 14, 2016, 10:45:45 PM

Quote from: RawDog on September 14, 2016, 01:43:14 PM

Hard forks are good. Stop crying. They allow two discrete paths to flourish and see which works best. Too freaking bad if some of your juice gets stuck on the 'bad' chain. On fork day, you've got equal action on both chains. Make good decisions thereafter. No harm, no foul.

Let's do it NOW!!!!

Fork it already.

Hard forks only work when a majority of the community is willing to change over to whichever chain they agree to use; if they don't agree on using the same one then everyone just gets confused and it is more detrimental than beneficial if everyone is splintered across multiple chains.

If the miners and devs can reach a consensus then we can switch, but until then there isn't much that can be done.

To be clear, the issue is not consensus of miners and devs. The issue is consensus of all Bitcoin users, which includes miners and presumably also includes devs. But the stakeholders in a hard fork are much more diverse than simply miners and devs. Miners ought to be following users out of rational incentive to mine the most highly valued chain. Miners shouldn't be provoking a hard fork themselves -- this is seen by many as an attack on users (attempting to leverage hash power to force users to migrate networks).

Yes, it's about all bitcoin users, but the majority of Bitcoin users will follow that chain which has the greatest consensus among developers and miners. So the argument is to some degree redirected to its starting point. In fact a "provocation" of a hardfork is only seen as a provocation if it proposed by a minority without consensus among the other miners and developers. Clearly it's rational for miners (and even more so for pool operators) to seek consensus on a sustainable solution. It makes no sense to mine on a minority chain.

In my opinion it's very important to have broad consensus (90% or more) when a hardfork occurs. Controversial hardforks have significant destructive potential not only by splitting up the community and thereby the wealth allocation on each coin but especially by undermining trust in future developments. So the psychological effect is even more far-reaching. Without unity, Bitcoin might quickly loose its perception of being a safe haven. People might feel that it's unsafe to store their funds with the currency, because another fork (with further value depreciation) might be just around the corner.

ya.ya.yo!