I make this post to go on record that I'm in favor of a hard fork of Bitcoin. The core devs and culture surrounding Bitcoin have allowed a 51% attack to occur, MtGox to become centralized, fail, and generate months of bad press, and refuse to switch out of SHA-256 and on to another hashing algorithm or at least Proof of Stake.
Other developers have been warning them, people were warned about MtGox, nothing changes. Instead excuses are constantly being made for increasing centralization. Every month we look and see more signs of centralization.
Either Bitcoin must be hard forked or I'll be using something else like NXT or Bitshares.
What the hell are you talking about?
Bitcoin is not sustainable as a decentralized currency. Proof of Work does not and by design cannot scale until a day when each of us can make chips in our basement 3d printers. Since we aren't chip makers, the electric company, or the producers of hashing power, we must continuously buy or borrow hashing power from others. The producers of hashing power control the SHA-256 Proof of Work technology and with it they have obtained the ability to 51% attack. Due to the economics the pyramid can be expected to continue to become more steep over time as control winds up in fewer hands.
The 51% attack which happened this week is a warning sign to anyone paying attention. It's a red flag exactly like what we saw when Mt Gox was not processing withdraws. The time to push for a hard fork is right now because Proof of Work as Bitcoin is implementing it is obsolete. It's an incomplete solution compared to a more complete solution such as the Cooperative Proof-of-Stake CPoS or Delegative Proof of Stake DPoS. NXT has a solution as well and the specific challenge we have is to promote the best technologies even when it might not be in the best economic interests of entrenched elites of Proof of Work Blockchain hierarchies.
They got in their positions because they chose the most advanced technology and I don't see why they should entitled to keep their leadership position if they do not consistently choose the best technology. Progress should be more important than whether or not some miners can get rich. If I were them I would pull some of my money out of Bitcoin and put it into Proof of Stake or I would fund the development of CPoS to support the hard fork of Bitcoin.