I was asked to provide some technical advice due to my iguana experience, so am helping as I can.
It is a security risk to having full bitcoin blocks and reduces the value of bitcoin. It seems that non-technical factors have delayed fixing this problem, some say it is because core team wants to create a fee market, ie where you have to pay more and more to get your tx confirmed.
Regardless of the reason, it should have been fixed over a year ago!
The fact that there is a serious effort now to free bitcoin development from corporate sponsorship, can only be a good thing.
But dont you think the fork would have catastrophic results on the economical side?
even a haphazard ETC fork with replay attack, DAO hacker, white hat group behaving like hackers, etc., the combined value of ETH+ETC is slightly higher than before the fork.
Is that what you mean by "catastrophic results"?
Long term having a more open bitcoin development process will be the opposite of catastrophic. So short term, volatility but with combined value likely higher. Long term two independently evolving serious crypto projects.
Dont let the fear mongers make you fearful of change. Not changing will be the worst thing as full blocks breaks the network
I am not scared )
Thought, bitcoin is the "mother" of all crypto, and when its forked it will casue a butterfly effect for the masses and the specultors on the maket, IF, it will go down, all will follow. It wont do any long term damage, but who knows
I'm not sure the consequences have played out yet. At the very least, Ethereum's momentum has come to screeching halt. There is no more talk of blowing by Bitcoin.
Also, it was demonstrated that it's trivial to fork Ethereum and poach massive amounts of hash power almost instantly. The miners are whores and will happily secure any major fork launched by a banking/corporate consortium.