My understanding of this debate is
that there are some people who want to keep Bitcoin at 1MB block limit, and
there are some who want to increase it.
I for one am curious to see how 1MB limited bitcoin
evolves, and I believe we can all have a chance to see this AND hard-fork
bitcoin to remove the block size restriction.
To remove the 1MB limit required a hard fork. This
is not disputed. It's what we do with the original (1MB limit) bitcoin that
concerns me (and other's I am sure).
What I would like to see is both being allowed to
live. Harry Potter and Voldermort! (Except neither are evil!)
The solution is to hard-fork and merge-mine. This
way, both can live, and mining power is not divided.
Dogecoin recently hardforked and this hardfork also
involved switching to merge-mining, so it's been done successfully.
So, simply, bitcoin as it is doesn't need to
actually fork, but instead, at a certain block size, a forked bitcoin with the
blocksize lmit removed will start to be merge-mined alongside bitcoin. Miners
can be ready for this. Wallets can be ready for this - in fact, for most wallets
and merchants they will possibly want to default to the bigger blocksize fork
since this caters for more transactions per block.
We still don't know how removing the block limit
will pan out and what other problems with scalability will arise in the future,
so by preserving the original bitcoin, we keep diversity, and people won't feel
their investments in bitcoin are being unnecessarily put at risk (as their
investments will stay in both the new and the old bitcoin).
The bitcoin core developers can implement a patch
like the one recently used for dogecoin, to allow the chain to fork at a set
point, where at which point, bitcoins will be split into the new and the old.
Branding will be an important issue here I think, so that there is as little
confusion as possible. I think this is a small price to pay in return for not
killing the original bitcoin (even if it's true that Satoshi did intend to
remove the 1MB limit at some point).
If I'm missing something obvious please let me
know.