This is an interesting question! According to Satoshi Nakamoto's posts on this forum, Bitcoin forks are a natural and democratic way to resolve disagreements between community members. 🙋
I remember Bitcoin forks being very popular in 2017. Bitcoin holders viewed them as a way to earn dividends (since they were worth a certain amount of money). Some cryptocurrency exchanges, like Bitfinex, regularly credited their users with new forks. Users could immediately sell this fork and increase their satoshis. 🦸 At its peak, Bitcoin Cash was worth 0.5 BTC... That's a lot.
He was mistaken, stop treating Satoshi like a prophet. He made many mistakes like all of us regularly do. Forks are not a good way to resolve anything, nobody could have predicted the amount of astroturfing and propaganda that will be utilized in this age. You bring a good example that disproves the view of Satoshi that you are quoting. Bitcoin Cash was an attack on Bitcoin that was run by a serial scammer, criminal and CSAM obsessed individual called Roger Ver. He invested considerable amounts of money to manipulate many people to join this attack on Bitcoin. When propaganda is so widespread, any kind of vote can not be considered "democratic". It is just one step less than actual fixing of the vote.
Now, nothing is heard about Bitcoin forks... And I wonder if there really is no disagreement in the community? Or perhaps there is no democracy either? Perhaps Bitcoin development and mining are now effectively monopolized?
Complete nonsense. We have soft forks all the time, and hard forks are not a thing because of the costs involved in reaching consensus. The risks are too great, this is how Bitcoin was designed to work. If you disagree something and in particular when almost nobody agrees with you, you can fuck off to your shitcoin. Each altcoin that was created was just a scam by the project founders who couldn't abuse Bitcoin to make large amounts of money for themselves.
Forks aren't over. As long as Bitcoin remains open source and decentralized, disagreement could still create forks.
Key splits such like Bitcoin cash and Bitcoin SV occurs as groups disagree on scaling and size of block. Such possibility exists always. Everyone can copy the code and launch a new chain.
Haven said that, another fork taking over the original Bitcoin is unlikely. The effect of the network, liquidity, infrastructure, and brand are deeply solid. Many past forks failed to achieve lasting relevance.
Therefore yes, fork can still occur technically. Though none may easily dethrone Bitcoin unless a large portion of miners, developers, businesses, and users go together, and that is very difficult to achieve.
Forks are never going to be over, saying something like that is meaningless. I can create a new fork within an hour or in a few minutes if I write a script to automate this process. That means nothing, none of those forks have any relevance to Bitcoin at all. They are attacks on Bitcoin by scammers, that is it. Don't confuse Bitcoin with scams that utilize its name.
