When you read old threads, you will hear of many soft forks and including a few hard forks that gave birth to Bitcoin Cash , Bitcoin gold, Bitcoin SV. The last one should be BSV in 2018.
What happened differently that there are no threats or signs of forking?
BCH, BTG BSV and other shit fork occurred because the community was not able to agree on the direction of the protocol, primarily over block size & fairness of mining but most failed due to a lack of support and liquidity. There are 100 forks shit, but 90% dead now
But now we no longer need drama, we have evolved to cooperate. We got the opportunity to upgrade (scaling, privacy & lightning support) without splitting the chains because of the soft forks like
SegWit & Taproot. Therefore, it is the reason why threats of hard fork have not been witnessed in the recent past. In other words, the use of forks was that of a chaos-guided experiment, whereas now Bitcoin is advancing intelligently through consensus.
What if Bitcoin cash was merge mined it might have been better.
Ive been trying to think of a idea that can really help. Like a merge mined fork called "Bitbill" the name may change but I like it. Could help miners with electric bills and late comers. The block size may have to be raised 64MB sounds crazy. But I would like the TPS to be more than Bitcoin Cash.
I think support is most important but liquidity will come with a great protocol. The branding and marketing can push it into being adopted.