On Forks and Consensus: A Debate

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The levels of controversy in the Bitcoin ecosystem have reached new heights. At the center of the current schism rests the soft vs. hard fork debate and how it relates to governance structures and code development. This event will allow us to explore this topic.

The event will be structured to allow each side of the debate to express their opinions without talking past one another; discussion will begin with members stating the assumptions on which their logic rest. Once assumptions have been stated, members representing each side of the debate will be given the opportunity to question those assumptions.

While the hard vs soft fork debate is predominantly technical, it reaches beyond that into questions of ideological merit. Discussions of this nature will be allowed but will be moderated to avoid endless debate. Here is the main topic for discussion, listed below are subtopics. Feel free to suggest other topics in the comments section:

hard vs. soft forks -- when do they make sense?

• Uncontroversial vs Controversial forks (95% vs 75%)

• Soft segwit vs Hard 2MB bump for immediate release

• Soft vs hard segwit

• Is democratic code development healthy for Bitcoin? / If Bitcoin is neither democracy or dictatorship, what is it?

• Layer 2--is it the best method to scale Bitcoin? Is it inevitability?