No one reasonably wants to hardfork. bilateral split
That is never going to happen, so either:
anytime soon a controversial hardfork of lots of orphan drama.
or
more reasonable time of better community uniting consensus IF blockstream give in and rewrite a proper 1 merkle blocksize of upto 4mb to match other peers desires
If SegWit SF never gets accepted then other softforks will be proposed. as will a hard consensus
Hardforks, majority of the time, will only be implemented after an emergency.
Hardforks are not an attack vector, but a bilateral split is, and thats just asking for trouble.
If we can programmatically avoid a bilateral split and still get a gain of hardfork consensus, we wont have to risk a bilateral fork. We only risk the latter when ALL other options have been exhausted. IMO, we haven't gotten there yet.
FTFY..
I agree, no one wants to bilateral split, but I also think no one wants to perform
a hardfork (even within 95% consensus, hypothetically) only for the "scaling issue"
now because people are afraid of the unintended consequences, as well as the
anticipated one. The scaling debate really comes down to decentralization. If a
hardfork affects that, then the majority will not support it (majority of everyone
other than miners). A hardfork is almost always a "leap of faith" due to it's centralizing
side effects, IMO.
If hardforkers really demand hardforks as the main protocol changing mechanism,
they should not be creating EC type clients and other clients to change the protocol,
but create new supporting structures for verifying nodes and decentralization under the
current protocol. For example, when block propagation became an issue between miners,
as the blocksize grew from low levels to 1MB, Core Developer Corallo developed and
released the FIBRE network to help support the mining network. Instead of allowing
failures, that mining relay system was created, to mitigate the impact that scaling to
1MB created. That is the next step for scaling, not EC or other consensus changing
systems, but backbone systems.
If new support structures can be created that preserves the decentralized and
independently verifying node network, then majority (but not all obviously) of hardfork
complaints and fears would vanish. Until those systems are created and accepted by the
community as being sufficient, the scaling hardfork proposal will never be reasonably
entertained, IMO. Any movement toward EC without those structures will always be
regarded as an attack instead of a solution, IMO.
If scaling proponents are genuine, they should be building foundations first, then
push for scaling second. Not the other way around like currently.
