I don't get all this hand-wringing about hard forks.
Everyone is paranoid that their fork won't be popular (whether among end-users or miners).
The paranoia is because hard forks create two copies of the same BTC value. If both survive that is 100% debasement. Afaics, Blockstream's pegged side chains eliminate the need for hard forks and thus resolve this issue.
I don't get all this hand-wringing about hard forks.
Everyone is paranoid that their fork won't be popular (whether among end-users or miners).
They seem to forget that on a world scale, nobody gives a crap about bitcoin still. Whether your fork occupies 0.0004% or 0.00004% of the world money supply is a rather minor distinction.
Look at it another way, would it be that horrible if your fork of bitcoin was "only" as popular as bitcoin was in 2011? That didn't stop anyone in 2011. And your fork would be way easier to use than bitcoin was then.
Put yet another way, I'd rather bitcoin be "right" than "popular". Whichever fork is what I want, that's what I'm going to use. If I wanted a "popular" currency and payment system, the dollar and Visa would be obvious choices, but that's not what any of us want.
and therein lies the answer of which fork will be most popular and will win at the end of the day. hint: look at the polls.
That does not necessary follow. Paradigm shift technical changes can alter trends of adoption. Your poll asks for a larger block size. It does not ask which other chain attributes, whether it is a pegged side chain, and which block size people will choose. For example, let's assume GavinCoin (XT) sticks with 20MB blocks (or even 8MB) in a hard fork (i.e. not a pegged side chain) but doesn't have the necessary opcode to support pegged side chains (without federated servers), and Blockstream offers a pegged side chain with 4MB blocks and the necessary opcodes. The majority might choose the later, while MPEX et al short and sell their coins in the XT, while the XT supports can't retaliate by selling their BTC in the pegged competitor.
You incessantly make overly generalized, myopic assertions which do not consider all the details and ramifications.
It appears that when considering an issue, your state machine has only perhaps one or two variables in it.
would the brainless stop perseverating over MPEX?
anyone who tries to manipulate the mkts like they're threatening to do will get creamed.
You make an assumption that the market in question will be symmetric in quality, but above I have explained a scenario where there is an asymmetry and thus the free market may not be able to override MPEX's asymmetric advantage.
If XT will be reformulated as a pegged side chain, then MPEX's threats will be nullified. But in that case, there is no longer a hard fork for us to consider (at least not with the attribute of two competing copies of the same BTC value).
