Hard Fork, Soft Fork, It doesn't matter. Bitcoin is useful and accepted almost everywhere.
Bitcoin is useful, but it's accepted almost nowhere because of concerns about price volatility, use in illegal activity, lack of knowledge from merchants and several other factors.
Bitcoin Block-size is NOT a problem. You can get a confirmation in less than 20 minutes for 30 cent fee. You pay $3 fee to get $20 out of an ATM! You can use 3rd party wallets for dust transactions if that's your thing.
You're conflating soft forks with hard forks, current Bitcoin with future Bitcoin, and block size with scalability. I didn't realise it was possible to do all of those things at once.
Can't wait to see the jaws drop when the price hits $2000.
If it does, it won't be because people are using it as a currency. It'll only be because people are stupidly using it to make profit. The reason I say this is that it's obvious Bitcoin can't take double the amount of transactions that it's currently used for, considering it's been intermittently struggling even at this level. You mention that alt coins are only traded for profit but that kind of extreme price rise in Bitcoin would be mainly triggered by desire for profit anyway (pumping as well, like altcoins but on a larger scale).
Bitcoin Unlimited is an Alt coin and nothing else. I'll speculate in it if there is a hard fork, but it's as good as Dogecoin to me.
It's an altcoin, but it's definitely more than that since everyone who holds Bitcoin will hold BU coin and have the opportunity to use it. It claims to contribute something to the network. While it's not a very good solution, it's hardly reasonable to act like it doesn't add anything to Bitcoin - the
only reason it exists is to add something to Bitcoin.
