IT guys do not pay enough attention to an important fact that a monetary system is not a software project, they have totally different priorities. Thus any kind of change that is normal for a software project can be devastating for a monetary system
Imagine that Federal Reserve change the USD version every 3 months, and even fork it once a while, so that USD from New York is not interchangeable with USD from California, just because New York FED and San Francisco FED have different view on QE, then the whole US economy will be in chaos like what happened in North Korea
I don't think its fair to compare Bitcoin to the FED.
The users of Bitcoin are not central banks, they're regular geeks who want to buy coffee, digital goods and drugs.
The network must fork/change to cater to the majority of users.
The metaphor is to describe fundamental differences in normal software projects and financial infrastructure
When you upgrade a software, you can always fall back to the old version when the new version does not work or created unexpected behavior
However, when a financial system like bitcoin went wrong following a fork, the loss in financial transaction is permanent , even if you reinstall the old version, the loss is irreversible. This fundamental difference will prevent people from accepting any dramatic change at any time
If you were here during the 2013 fork, you might still remember that some people lost lots of coins following the fork, and those losses are permanent. The solution at that time is that the mining pools and wallet service providers compensated those users. I'm afraid that's not an option today when bitcoin are used at much larger scale and commands much higher value
I held coins through the 2013 fork and concur that losses occurred.
Bitcoin has forked multiple times in the past, including recently for the BIP66 change.
I don't see users fleeing en masse, given that the network continues to work today.
We will have to accept that for any technological advancement, a hard fork is part and parcel of it.
Wouldn't you rather have the value of your coins grow exponentially through better technology being added to Bitcoin such as lightning/bloom filtering txns/ relay networks?
Bitcoin must remain bleeding edge money following some core tenets, otherwise it will perish.
