It is good to ask. I was referring to the person that you've quoted. Your thinking is correct; until the transaction gets included in a single block (1 confirmation) it is marked as a zero-conf transaction and is not final.
It's possible to reverse a transaction with 1 confirmation but that is quite hard and becomes much harder the more confirmations that it has; these are things that you do not need to concern yourself with though. Your assumption is also correct, but mostly for transactions that have an inadequate fee. You could "take" someone else's "slot" by including a fee that is a bit higher.

There is no need for this right now. The fork is an political attempt at taking over the development of the main implementation. Segwit offers an adequate increase in transaction capacity (along with other benefits) and should ensure enough space for 2016 (it will grow with adoption).

Depending on the time that the fork would occur (between difficulty adjustments) you could say that they aren't allowed to. The chain becomes rendered useless for a longer time because of the other majority. It is clear that we can't get everyone on board on a single proposal (and thus 100% consensus is impossible), but nobody sane would recommend a split. Essentially the people behind the fork do not care much about the whole industry and especially not about the users, they just want to take over.

I.e. "not rational actors pursuing enlightened self-interest, the possibility of which Bitcoin failed to take into account."

75% is generous, normally you need 67% to change constitution laws in most countries. It is always tradeoff how big minority you want give the right to veto majority will. If you think 5% or 10% can veto 90% majoriy, your probably part of this minority and want more power than you actually have.

What about if we need 90% support for not increasing to 2MB, otherwise we increase to 2MB. You see, just 10% could veto such change even if almost 90% would disagree. It is not right to give such small minority much veto power in eighter case in my opinion, 67% mostly used has reasons behind, and 75% is very generous imo if 26% still can be allowed to veto 74% will

I see your point but... exchanges might chose to remain open in one fork or another instead of just closing operations. They lose money if they remain closed and if there is a hardfork, I guess it would be better to have some than nothing.

It is obviously in everyones interest to make sure this does not happen.  there is noway that miners and exchanges are going to make radical changes that could cause a blockchain fork.  and definatly not one that they keep mining.

If you mean Bitcoin is for privileged group who decide, and not users who have right to vote with the hashing power needed to secure the network, then you just describe totalitarian system which hardly anyone signed up when joining Bitcoin. And your free to follow old rules if you preffer, the same way Im free to follow new rules.

Exchanges can decide what to do, but the big ones showed support for 2MB, so you see problem where there is none.

So you are saying that The SegWit Omnibus protocol changeset is defined entirely in a BIP, and that BIP lays out a 95% soft fork threshold? Great! That is news I had not yet assimilated.

While this is 'kind of true', it elides some vital detail. The fact of the matter is that any node that wishes to operate in a trustless manner must still validate the signature information. IOW for trustless nodes, there is no data reduction.


Well, no. Only for non-fully-validating nodes. All nodes that ignore the signature chain will need to trust other -- fully-validating nodes (which get no capacity boost) -- to do the validation for them.

We don't "need" almost everyone for any change. That's what the minority would like to think but no, if 75% agrees to kick out 25% away. Then 75% have come to a consensus to get rid of the armful 25%. End of story. There is nothing the 25% can do to stop the 75% to do whatever they want.