Adam Back

1/ On hard forks, I'm with @gavinandresen. Risks of not increasing block size seem > increasing. Miners will go where users & exchanges go.

2/ There's precedent for how miners behave during a hard fork (2013) & until sidechains are ready in 2016+, need bigger block size...

3/ Otherwise #bitcoin functionality breaks down. Users lose trust, value / confidence breaks down, etc.

4/ But set aside the tech arguments. Look at the politics: there will be hard forks in the future, best to test #bitcoin's resilience now.

5/ Governments fighting money laundering could try to hard fork network.

6/ Anyone who wishes to change the underlying consensus algo good fork because they don't like "wasteful" or centralized PoW.