Quote from: Emoclaw on October 16, 2017, 05:09:21 AM

Quote from: Real_Person on October 16, 2017, 12:43:47 AM

Some people love the free money, but it seems really bad for Bitcoin long-term.

It's actually really good for Bitcoin long-term. Hard forks are great and Bitcoin was designed with them in mind. Proposals to change the Bitcoin protocol are another thing that makes Bitcoin decentralized. In the long-term, only one, the community-chosen chain will survive. This is the case with Bitcoin Cash. Although it's still fairly active, it did not influence Bitcoin at all and Bitcoin has kept growing rapidly since then.

What makes you think Bitcoin was designed with hard forks in mind? Satoshi built Bitcoin with forward compatibility; the templates (scripts) used in future versions can be processed (if not necessarily understood/validated) by older versions. This is why backward compatible soft forks are ideal for Bitcoin.

I'm not sure how Satoshi felt about hard forks. He didn't give much indication. On one hand, there is the often-cited quote that we could increase the blocksize limit by programming the fork at a block far in the future. But shortly after, he said that Bitcoin users might become increasingly tyrannical about the size of the blockchain. He didn't seem to offer any clear indication either way, suggesting that the question of future hard forks was entirely up to the user base, not him.