[sneak]

> Since a hard fork would require agreement from essentially everyone involved in Bitcoin, there's essentially no chance of this limit being increased.

The bitcoin network underwent a hard fork a couple weeks ago due to a bug in the implementation of the on-disk database.

The developers reached out to the mining pools and got the vast majority downgraded within 8 or 12 hours. A day or two later a new version was pushed out that mimicked the old behavior up until the point that a supermajority of nodes were upgraded, and then switched to the new behavior.

Forks have happened before, and the community is close-knit enough to resolve them. Everyone's primary goals are a) being ideologically neutral and b) keeping the network running, in equal measure.