Are hard forks the poor developer's ICO?
Two attempts since August to hard fork bitcoin, two more ahead of us. These developers just want lay claim to the best cryptocurrency and instead of creating it from scratch they feel they need to hijack bitcoin - why?
Developers who pursue hard forks really are trying to get something for nothing. And they give us something for nothing (in the airdrop) to try to get us to subscribe to their sheisty intentions.
Hard forks are great for Bitcoin, because the prove that Bitcoin is right and strong. But I don't see how anyone can have pride in supporting or developing a hard fork.
Can you?
The way I see it is that everyone will naturally have different visions for how to move forwards, which means there will always be varying demand for different clients that only some participants on the network agree with. Bitcoin isn't a democracy and there's no voting. The only way to achieve a vision for Bitcoin that some don't agree with is to just go ahead and code it and see how much support it gets in the wild. People seem to have this perverse idea that consensus means everyone has to agree all of the time, but that's not correct. Consensus means the people who do agree will be naturally matched up and will build a blockchain together. The alignment of incentives and network effects mean that the largest group of people who agree should naturally have the most successful chain (most economic activity, most proof of work, most widely accepted by payment processors, etc).