You can call it a hard fork, or you can call it a mandatory upgrade version 3 blocks.

Either way I'm not worried about it because:

1) It's an upgrade that was discussed as eventually being necessary literally from the beginning so I don't consider it to be a change to the nature of Bitcoin.

2) Far more people will go along with a change that increases the value of the network than a change that destroys it. A majority of users who are willing to change the 21M limit is indistinguishable from a 51% attack, so in that case Bitcoin is doomed regardless of whether we change the transaction limit or not.

Consider what this means about the demand for Bitcoins now as compared to the past. TC is selling them faster than ever before yet the price is still over $40.

Transaction processing is a service whose value is proportional to it's speed, low cost, and Metcalfe's law.

Bitcoins are virtual objects whose value is depends on the inability of any entity to create more of them arbitrarily.

Same thing. Without the coercion they aren't governments any more. We have other words for organizations which do the same job without the violence, like "charity", "insurance companies", "business", etc.

You keep saying this no matter how many times someone points out that it isn't true.

Governments are evil, violent mafias. When people stop believing it's virtuous to point guns at their neighbors to get what they want governments will be extinct.

Right. There is an attack, but it's originating from the OP.

The problem of unspendable outputs can be fixed with dust collection algorithms in the clients.

With every transaction the coin selection algorithm can check to see if any dust outputs can be included as an input without causing the transaction to require a higher fee.

Good plan - why implement changes to make the network more scalable when you could snipe at Satoshi dice instead?

These people who keep promising a crash also keep failing to deliver.

It is true that counterparty risk reduces the value of the IOU, but the ability to transfer dollars IOUs as easily as one can transfer bitcoins increases the value.

Personally I would be willing to keep all my dollars in the Ripple system because I see the combined effect as net positive.

I would never keep bitcoins in the Ripple system though, because that just adds counterparty risk without adding any compensating benefit.

Unless, of course, certain people are successful at keeping Bitcoin limited to a cripplingly low transaction rate to artificially make blockchain transfers slower and more expensive.

tl;dr:

Ripple makes dollars more useful.
Ripple makes bitcoins less valuable.

Coinbase has non-business accounts.

I'm not sure if that's true. In some cases I'm more inclined to believe malice to be more likely than ignorance.

Some people don't want Bitcoin to be successful.

Of course some people benefit from it - otherwise it wouldn't happen at all.

Resource misallocation is all about enriching a minority at the expense of everybody else - that's why they do it.

There is more demand for buying coins than they can supply.

Since they say the limit is based on a rolling 24 hour window, when that happens to me I try again every 15 minutes or so until it works.

Look two posts above yours.

Second half of August.

I can construct a scenario in which Mt Gox benefits from the high trade volume generated by a panic.

They are operating on a fractional reserve of bitcoins due to losses from an undisclosed hack and need the extra fees to cover their losses.

There will be no centralization if the max block size is removed.

Once Bitcoin starts processing as many transactions as PayPal the fee revenue will match the block subsidy. From that point on increased transaction volume growth will create noticeably larger block rewards which will attract more miners, not fewer.

The number of BitPay employees is a good measure of how much Bitcoin is being used for commerce.