Quote from: AngryDwarf on May 23, 2017, 05:53:01 AM

That's a lot of DCG portfolio companies disagreeing with the road map put forward by the other DCG portfolio company, BS.

But what is the point of segwit if you are going to do a hard fork anyway? The whole point of segwit is that it masquerades hard fork functionality through a soft fork, so if hard forks can work safely (Monero hasn't blown up yet, nor Dash or Ethereum*), then the functionality provided by segwit can be implemented in a cleaner manner with a HF.

*Ethereum has hard forked many times, only a contentious one ended up with a permanent split chain.

Indeed, the whole thing of soft fork versus hard fork is ridiculous: in both cases you change the protocol. The difference resides in:
1) a way to ENFORCE it: if 51% of the hash power implements the soft fork, it is enforced upon the 49% (exactly like a 51% attack enforces the new history upon the whole system)

2) the ridiculous belief that non-mining nodes (who can be Sybiled at almost no cost) have an important role to play, and hence to "respect nodes with old software" (who cannot USE the new protocol, but don't block it).

If a cryptocurrency is centralized on a dev team, then it can hardfork in the same way it can soft fork. This is what many crypto currencies do, of which, indeed, DASH, ethereum and monero are examples. Monero even has a REGULAR hardforking policy: it is in the code that the running protocol remains only valid up to a certain block, so IN ANY CASE a hardfork is needed.

If a cryptocurrency is truly decentralized, its protocol is immutable in the same way its history is immutable.

You can't have it both ways.