With this post I'm attempting to explain in simple terms why we need to continue pushing for a SegWit soft fork and not get confused by the problems related to transaction backlog and rising fees.

First of all, a hard fork is a serious undertaking in Bitcoin. Hard forks in Bitcoin should not be compared to more flexible altcoins, they are not the same. Bitcoin is about robustness, reliability and security. Hard forks should not be done hastily.

A proper hard fork would take months of planning. Then it would take many months of lead time for activating. We are talking in total 6-18 months here. That is how long it will take if done in any sort of responsible manner.

SegWit soft fork however, can be activated within a month, if we can get the miners on board. Over 50 {88c91daedd271a990a10650c05d769cae2765e0603edf30ca95f18704e5748e8} of the nodes already support SegWit and the services in the ecosystem have a high level of preparedness for it. This is a much faster option that does not force anyone to upgrade.

SegWit gives us around 100 {88c91daedd271a990a10650c05d769cae2765e0603edf30ca95f18704e5748e8} of more capacity and with SegWit soft fork all old clients will still work. You're not forced to upgrade. You will probably want to upgrade since you'll get lower fees and access to the lightning network.

That brings me to the second important point which is the lightning network. Lightning network alpha was recently released which can now be successfully used in the Bitcoin testnet. After SegWit, it can be used in the main network right away!

That is one of the real long term solutions to processing large amounts of small transactions. A solution that does not danger the decentralized and censorship-free nature of Bitcoin, which is more important than anything, including usability issues.

I am not against a block size increase in general. I believe we will need to raise the block size at some point. But hard forks are a serious undertaking and in this situation it simply makes no sense to do a hard fork.

The community can and should continue discussing hard forks in the future but at this moment in time the by-far best option is to activate SegWit and get an increase in capacity, while allowing people to start using and further developing the lightning network.

The focus right now should be in talking to the miners about this and get more of them on board. Focusing on a controversial hard fork is not going lead to a swift improvement in the situation.