So I've been trying to keep up with developments with the (likely) upcoming Bitcoin hard fork and I have to say it's incredibly complex and difficult to understand.
There seems to be two main camps - Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen ('for' the 20mb block size mod hard fork ) versus Adam Back and many others deeply concerned and worried by what's being suggested.
I'm no expert on the technological issues associated with the change but I'm picking up a sense that Hearn and Andresen are frustrated by the slow pace of development to effect improvement in the protocol and are pushing for this hard fork in a bull-dozing-through manner on the assumption that it just can't be achieved any other way and that they have many senior people across many major stakeholder organisations within the Bitcoin realm very much onside. But there are many many people in considerable disagreement, not the least of which are Chinese miners that are grouping together pushing for a more modest 8mb block size change.
Adam Back has written a very long and (IMO) well articulated posting to Mike Hearn on why the approach they're pushing for is so high risk and so problematic. You can read the whole thing here
http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/34208939/Of particular note is this bit:
I know you want scale bitcoin, as I said everyone here does. I think
what you're experiencing is that you've had more luck explaining your
pragmatic unilateral plan to non-technical people without peer review,
and so not experienced the kind of huge pushback you are getting from
the technical community. The whole of bitcoin is immensely
complicated such that it takes an uber-geek CS genius years to
catchup, this is not a slight of any of the business people who are
working hard to deploy Bitcoin into the world, its just complicated
and therefore not easy to understand the game-theory, security,
governance and distributed system thinking. I have a comp sci PhD in
distributed systems, implemented p2p network systems and have 2
decades of applied crypto experience with a major interest in
electronic cash crypto protocols, and it took me a several years to
catchup and even I have a few hazy spots on low-level details, and I
addictively into read everything I could find. Realistically all of
us are still learning, as bitcoin combines so many fields that it
opens new possibilities.
I wonder what others think about all of this? It's possible something fairly disadvantageous is about to happen to Bitcoin and it could come as a big shock for everyone not following what's going on.
As has been pointed out before, BTC is the backbone and entry crypto for every other alt. As BTC goes up, alts go up with it (and sometimes accelerate over and above the BTC rate of increase). Likewise, if BTC was to suffer some alarming fork where there was a failure consensus that went on for more then a few hours, the results could be disastrous and we could see value demolished with an even more devastating effect on alts.
Interested to hear views.