I can't believe they're just going to fling the hardfork out there and cross their fingers they get a majority adoption. They must feel it's getting urgent.
This specific proposal (20MB blocks) is recent, but the whole debate has been going on for two years, if not more. I'm personally amazed at the bitcoin community's capacity to talk shit to death.
In fact, that's one of the things that makes me skeptical about bitcoin's future and hopeful about Dash's. The bitcoin community has argued for two years over making an improvement to their protocol, and still nothing has happened.* On the other hand, Dash hasn't even existed for two years yet has completely redefined itself and gone through more hardforks/sporks than I can even remember. In a little over a year, we went from being another pointless altcoin (Xcoin) to added masternodes, darksend, masternode reward schedule changes, adding a reference node, InstantX, decentralized governance, removing the reference node, and a professional project management team. On the horizon we have possible scalability solutions and darksend improvements like masternode blinding.
In two years bitcoin has done virtually nothing*, and Dash has created the most technologically innovative crypto in the world. Network effects are a powerful thing, but radical improvements in technology usually trump everything.
(*I'm aware that bitcoin has gone through numerous updates in the last two years, but the majority were minor. Some were nice, like faster syncing by downloading headers first, but we aren't really talking about mass-innovation here.)
