As we've observed with ETH, hard forks can go terribly wrong when rushed. A minority is enough to keep another chain alive. This sets a very bad precedent, both by forking without consensus/reverting events and by rushing a HF. In addition to that, a rushed HF would render a LOT of custom implementations invalid pretty quickly. Do you even realize how 'long' it takes for companies to both update, test and deploy new software to their whole infrastructure.
I'm not saying I'm anti-HF in general, however I'm against irrational decision making with a very limited view point. I think that a HF, with a grace period of 6 months may be plausible and would likely not be against it (dependent on the change-set of course).
though it seems lauda is waking up.. things need to be pointed out
a consensual hardfork (95%) is where 95% have already said yes, already reviewed the code.. meaning there is no shock, no surprise, meaning the movement across after activation is simple
i like how he tries to push that hard forks are bad.. but he slips in the little things subtly, although they are important..
eg "without consensus/reverting events"
this is because even in a surprising controversial fork. orphans will make the weaker minority die off. bitcoin is a big industry and any delays to block solving due to lack of hashpower, which leads to a fee war to get first place in next block, make it unaffordable to use aswell as slow, which renders businesses inefficient if they continue to use the weak chain.. will make decisions to move to the stronger chain real simple and fast.
alot faster than ethereum
again reviewing the code can be done pre-fork. many implementations have had hard fork code released for the last year... and a fork hasn't even happened yet. so in a concensual hard fork. the code is pre-reviewed and 95% are ready and waiting for the move.
but if the controversial fork added code to block the orphan events, and was an entirely new rule no one reviewed, and had things that ensured the weaker fork survived by auto blocking stronger fork nodes by default and tweaking difficulty (as lauda hinted removing the reverting events by forcing them not to talk to each other to not revert to a single chain). then even now bitcoiners would still make an easy decision to go with one direction. simply because bitcoin is actually useful
if merchants dont accept it, it theres a fee war and if the difficulty is tweaked to be at risk of 51% attack.. people wont use it. the minority would move quickly..
ethereum is not a good comparison because ethereum is useless in the real world.
so there is no clear choice which is better because both Ether's are useless.
