For fork's sake, what's the worst that can happen?

[bitterbug]

If consumers are better-off in the presence of openly competing forces, at least in the mid-to-longer run, what is the worst that can come of a hard fork?

Wouldn't separate experiments : one for bigger blocks and another for alternative solutions to transaction latency whilst maintaining decentralization, make us all winners once it becomes clear which approach could best be leveraged to defeat Bitcoin's real enemies? 

I won't claim to have looked at the problem from every angle, so please highlight any glaring problems with a hard fork I may be missing.

[Holliday]

There are basically two reasons, off the top of my head, that people consider a contentious fork as dangerous.

One is that two coins competing for Bitcoin's market share will both be using the same proof of work, which could get ugly when it comes to 51% attacks, et cetera.

Another is that the resulting chaos will erode Bitcoin's value entirely, regardless of the outcome.

[Carlton Banks]

It comes down to the same thing with every hard-fork proposed by an external programming team.


They all, XT, Classic and BU, refuse to write their code in a way that minimises disruption, they insist on leaving inter-chain attacks possible. They are determined to force an all-or-nothing situation on the users, where inter-chain attacks prevent the 2 chains from operating in parallel and competing without interference.

[calkob]

If consumers are better-off in the presence of openly competing forces, at least in the mid-to-longer run, what is the worst that can come of a hard fork?

Wouldn't separate experiments : one for bigger blocks and another for alternative solutions to transaction latency whilst maintaining decentralization, make us all winners once it becomes clear which approach could best be leveraged to defeat Bitcoin's real enemies? 

I won't claim to have looked at the problem from every angle, so please highlight any glaring problems with a hard fork I may be missing.

This is exactly what i have been thinking all day, and to be honest if any off my friends and family ask about this i will be explaining that bitcoin is open source and this sort of thing is a feature of open source software,  its a feature not a bug......