Control of Bitcoin rests in the hands of miners when you're talking about a chain fork.
And miners are essentially paid employees/contractors.
The Economic Majority is who the miners work for:
http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Economic_majorityNow what isn't being appreciated is exactly how risky it is to miners to adopt changes that have the potential to put them mining on the wrong side of a fork.
Let's say you run an exchange (e.g., BitStamp), hosted (shared) E-Wallet (e.g., Coinapult), or merchant processor (e.g., BitPay). If you start accepting bitcoins from miners (which become spendable after 100 confirmations) then you are taking on the entire risk of loss if the proposed fork fails to maintain the lead. So maybe to protect against that risk you reject any deposits or purchases that include coins that are tainted from post-fork coinbases. That immediately kills fungibility. The miners won't want to take on the full risk themselves and begin to dump their newly mined post-fork coins at a discount. Pretty soon the unchanged side of the blockchain fork gains hashing power and begins to snowball. The writing is then on the wall. Maybe 24 or 48 hours later, the proposed fork that initially had "wide support" is no longer the longest chain.
Now when that happens you have havoc wreaked because certainly this was an outcome that some fraudsters were hoping for and the two sides look nothing alike -- with many, many coins spent differently between the two sides of the fork.
I'm not saying I wouldn't like to see a bigger blocksize. I'm just pointing out that a hard fork will require a huge collective leap of faith -- and even this sole promise of dissent might be sufficient to torpedo that forking effort.
I'm not sure I go along with this thesis which strikes me as a little simplistic in this day and age.
Firstly it assumes that miners are driven to much by economics and to little by politics than is probably true. I'm sure that most of the miners who count these days have every likelihoods of looking out days or weeks into the future and taking a monetary hit for a future enduring reward. That is, keeping the system operating in a way which benefits them...whatever that might be. But wait, there's more...
For a long time now it has occurred to me that sitting on a pile of BTC is a very good proxy for mining, and that is even more the case if miners cannot see more than a few feet in front of them. It would be trivial for someone with BTC to simply buy the coinbase for 100-on-the-dollar (so to speak) and eliminate the risk to a miner of mining the wrong chain. Many of whales got involved at about the time when a days worth of mining (at the 50 BTC coinbase) cost an average coder two weeks of wages or less, so it is pretty certain that there are people with the resources to keep an arbitrary chain going for some time.
Thirdly, I would be highly surprised not to see some entities having bizarre network, power, and legal problems at an inopportune time should a war break out at this phase of the game. Bitcoin has enough potential at this point that various tangential actors (state, corporate, etc) might have a significant interest in the outcome. Just a guess on my part.