This starts to remind me of the altcoin market where devs need to do some handholding for the market, lol...
yes, its interesting because in some way they do. it wasnt that hard to see one year ago that the market (and for big parts the community) will look forward to a blocksize-raise and big tensions could come into the bitcoin-economy. it was tremendously silly to underestimate the force of the community, even if you think that 2MB HF is a bad thing you should be able to understand that a breakup of the community may be a much bigger risk. a rational decision would favor 2MB HF anytime instead of a contentious HF.
Is there any reason to believe Segwit won't happen in a few months
nope, question is a.) will they get their shit together? b.) how big will the added space really be?
and hard fork next year for even more?
yes, there is reason to believe so. core already pronounced that they need consensus to add a HF, but with friedenbach we already have one core dev opposing the HF in public, set aside Gmax who didnt declare anything to the HK-consensus.
that leaves some serious doubts if the HK has any credibility and as long as that uncertainty persists we see trouble...
As I see it, the only real uncertainty of the economy is about the existence of a contentious hard fork. As long as that threat doesn't exist, the market goes well (450-500$ a few months ago, when XT seemed to fail and Classic hadn't yet appeared / Hearn hadn't yet published his FUD/obituary).
The market, in general, given the moves that the price has been doing, indicates that it considers it a given that core devs know what they are doing and that they will be upgrading the system as needs arise. Their work on scaling for immediate use (0.12 improvements), short-term use (segwit), mid to long term use (further developments + LN), is the only serious work done on scaling and resolution of existing problems.
1.7mb (segwit) or 2mb (as proposed by classic hf) is too small of a difference to even play any meaningful role in massive pumps or dumps and "blocks are full" propaganda will still be the same, whether at 1-2-4mb, as long as the fees are near-zero cost for the blocks to be filled by spammers. As for the hard fork next year, well... we'll see how that goes.
