Before strong encryption, users had to rely on password protection to secure their files, placing trust in the system administrator to keep their information private. Privacy could always be overridden by the admin based on his judgment call weighing the principle of privacy against other concerns, or at the behest of his superiors. Then strong encryption became available to the masses, and trust was no longer required. Data could be secured in a way that was physically impossible for others to access, no matter for what reason, no matter how good the excuse, no matter what.
It's time we had the same thing for money. With e-currency based on cryptographic proof, without the need to trust a third party middleman, money can be secure and transactions effortless.
Bitcoin is about individual sovereignty, not rule by a majority of miners, nodes, users, bitcoins, or whatever. If you use a full node, then you will absolutely reject
no matter what any blocks or transactions that create too many bitcoins, or spend bitcoins without a valid signature, or double-spend outputs, or exceed the limits. This extreme resistance to change within the core rules is Bitcoin's primary advantage over all other money, and the only reason bitcoins have any value at all is because people can rely on these core rules not to be changeable by some external force.
If you want a currency backed by democracy, there are a number of democratic countries with currencies you can use.
A hardfork should proceed only if there is no significant opposition. In a contentious hardfork:
- Bitcoin is split into two pieces, which is extremely damaging to Bitcoin.
- There is an attempt to coerce people who want to stick with the core consensus rules they originally agreed to into abandoning these rules.
If a sufficient degree of agreement can be had, then I'm fine with hardforks otherwise. The hardfork proposal that BlueMatt et al. will present later this year as a result of their Hong Kong agreement might be uncontroversial enough to get sufficient agreement.
In any case, however, almost all hardforks
can be done as softforks instead. SegWit is one example of increasing capacity without a hardfork, and in a very non-disruptive way. A hardfork would in many cases be cleaner, but if it ends up being the case that sufficient consensus is basically impossible to achieve in most cases, the prospect of relying entirely on softforks doesn't worry me at all. Possibly, hardfork-type changes in Bitcoin will almost always be done first as a softfork, and then the softfork will be made simpler and more efficient in an uncontroversial hardfork later. (Sidechains would allow for doing this in a particularly clean way.)
