The price might just hold for long enough so that most will continue believing until it is already to late. The price could just hold while Bitcoin is overtaken. Also keep in mind the vast majority of potential capital will not be coming from the Bitcoiners of today but from the masses coming into the ecosystem, the question is where will these new people put their funds. The majority of Bitcoiners might just continue to hold and believe in Core during this process. Like I said before many of them will continue to believe for much longer, even when it is obvious to most what has happened, the folly of arrogance.
Much of my skepticism stems from the idea that after segwit is implemented it will no longer be possible to increase the blocksize again because of certain peculiarities in the code that is being introduced in segwit, which would break if the blocksize was increased again. Someone please correct me if I am wrong since I would gain much more confidence in Bitcoin if that was not the case. That is why now I am seeing that as a point of no return, which is why the recent statement from slush and results of the mining voting is making me think that segwit will be implemented, and I do not want to be a part of such a Bitcoin at all.
The spinoff/fork differential in price is key; price drop by itself only expresses ambiguous warning that many people will simply take to reinforce their current view.
For Corecoins to diverge in price from what we will want to call bitcoins, there needs to be substantial difference in what people think the values of the two Bitcoin ledger-copies will end up being. Right now too many people continue to think Core will keep things acceptable for the future (including promised timely blocksize increase), so there is not enough difference to motivate an exchange to offer fork or spinoff coin futures. It would still seem just a bit premature when I think about it realistically. This kind of unprecedented maneuver won't happen until things start getting ridiculous.
Think from the position of an investor that is not down in the weeds of this debate like we are. They will simply assume Core's promises are sincere and see no reason to do anything unorthodox like forking or spinning off, and - they may say - even should such a thing be needed, we would like to assume for the time being that it is not.
"I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened."
- Mark Twain
The conservative position is to assume things will work out with Core and that they are not totally bonkers. "If they do turn out to be totally bonkers, we can adjust when demand rises substantially beyond the capacity they are willing to offer," they will say. And exchanges may say, "In fact how can we really even justify offering an investment product before that happens?"
The darkmarket subreddits provide a reality check whenever the rest of the community goes crazy with worry over this or that. I have never seen even one single commenter complain about Bitcoin transaction delays or fees on those subs, and although a few markets probably accept altcoins I haven't seen anyone complain about, say, Agora not taking anything but Bitcoin. Any questions are about how to tumble and other things unrelated to network issues.
This shows that all this blocksize high alert full blocks / slow confirmations / etc. is future projection in terms of practical effect on real commerce. If the darkmarket subs were saying
anything about this I might be sympathetic to guys like /u/Vibr8gKiwi. But as it stands this is just pure anticipatory angst. Warranted by people like us, yes, and there is also the Fidelity Effect, but that degree of hypothetical growth is not enough to get exchanges setting up something unfamiliar like fork arbitrage via futures trading.
If and when things do get ridiculous, and we do see start to see actual commercial users who don't know shit about Bitcoin complaining and darkmarkets starts switching to altcoins for commerce because of congestion and high fees, then the motivation will be there. Wake me when that happens
(And I see several paths that never even lead to that needing to happen.)
As for Segwit preventing future increases in blocksize...with spinoffs anything is possible. To think that Segwit could prevent something in Bitcoin proper would seem to conflate Bitcoin the ledger with Core the protocol that happens to be what most people are using to update the ledger now. The only thing that needs to stay intact for Bitcoin to continue is the record of the keypairs and their balances (the ledger itself).
