I don't know of a single responsible bitcoin developer that wouldn't prefer using soft-forks to hard-forks. Bitcoin has had hard-forks in the past, but they have been done in response to a specific issue, and were done very quickly. What's most important, everyone agreed that the hard-fork had to be done.
The current attempt by Coinbase to force a contentious hard-fork is dangerous. There are many people that even question its requirement, let alone whether it can be done safely.
I'm not saying it's not going to happen, but it isn't going to be done quickly, and if it is finally going to happen, it'll be managed by the core developers.
Go read Satoshi's first announcement of Bitcoin on the crypography list. The very first question ever is about scalability and he states quite clearly that he thought about it extensively and it would never be an issue in practice. He uses Visa as an example to illustrate his point.
Now go read the Lightning white paper. They also use Visa as an example and state that Bitcoin cannot scale. They directly contradict Satoshi on literally the first Bitcoin topic ever discussed.
So I am not speaking for Satoshi in my post above: I am pointing out that he strongly disagreed with Poon & Dryja's reasoning right from day one.
As you can see above, Joseph uses the same language some of the other Bitcoin Core folks use ... they like to say "our understanding is much better now". They do not like to explain exactly what this "better understanding" actually is, given that computers haven't got any slower. They just assert that it could never work. That's unfortunate.
> They do not like to explain exactly what this "better understanding" actually is, given that computers haven't got any slower.
Scalability isn't only about going fast/slow. Scalability is about growth in performance, reliability, guarantees, etc. What counts as better (or worse)? And what are the tradeoffs? And which tradeoffs can we reliably make without breaking the system's guarantees, if indeed it makes any guarantees at all? It's easy to see how Satoshi may not have been omnipotent. Indeed many programmers don't always know all performance characteristics of all the software they write; too, we see programmers taking up opinions on system performance even when their opinion is wrong (some are even known to recognize when they are wrong and update their opinions based on new better knowledge).
Five times $2 isn't much -- and sometimes I'm willing to pay to have something today: Not in 3-4 weeks. It's not like arduinos (or whatever) are something I'm burning through often enough to worry about a few extra dollars.
