I had my own mini Bitcoin-scaling debate with @ToneVays on twitter last week. I've been so busy trying to get my website to a somewhat presentable state that I haven't had any time to blog about it yet. But, I've finally come up for air; so I thought I'd take a minute to lay it out.
Tone's basic argument, as I understand it, is that any hard fork in Bitcoin is bad because a hard fork has the potential for splitting the network into two chains. Tone and I agree that splitting the network would be damaging to many users, and this is the "moral hazard" to which he refers.
Unfortunately, what Tone refuses to acknowledge is that not all hard forks are created equally. Bitcoin, and many other cryptocurrencies, have employed hard forks to upgrade their networks in the past without causing currency splits because these upgrades were recognized as beneficial to the system.
Tone incorrectly asserts that any hard fork to increase Bitcoin's block size, at this moment, will result in a 100% chance of a split in the network, but that simply can't be true. Given a moments thought, it's easy to see that a modest block increase to 2MB, while contentious, would have to be less contentious than the Bitcoin Unlimited proposal to let the network participants change the block size on the fly through dynamic consensus, which incentivizes sophisticated miners to mine increasingly larger and larger blocks. So if the probability of a split under a 2MB increase is something less than the probability of a split under a hostile implementation of Bitcoin Unlimited, then it's also less than 100%, absolute certainty.
What people on both sides of this debate fail to recognizes is that, like it or not, Bitcoin is first-and-foremost a network of people, which means that politics, diplomacy, and compromise are necessary to growth, not impediments to growth.
In my mind, the only way to ensure a 100% likelihood of splitting the network is to completely ignore and refuse to compromise with a pissed-off (and growing) minority in the community. Even if segwit is eventually passed, if the concerns of those who want bigger blocks are not actively addressed in good faith, then many of those folks will split off from Bitcoin or abandon it for another network where they have a voice.
The whole conversation is embedded on my site; so of course, everyone is encouraged to form their own opinion.
https://www.cryptotech.solutions/bitcoin-scaling-twitter-debate-with-tone-vays/