This sums up the whole piece in my view. Bitcoin development stagnated years ago exactly because nobody involved wanted to change/hard fork it to implement improvements.
For people who want a Bitcoin-like Ethereum with no DAO fork or staking there's Ethereum Classic.
I wouldn’t consider that stagnate.
What we should think of as constituting sound money has not changed since 2008.
That is what bitcoin is supposed to be - sound money.
Ethereum is supposed to be something else - and it makes sense for Ethereum to "innovate" much more than bitcoin does.
Bitcoin can't be used as money in most cases as transactions are too expensive and slow. It has failed its primary function. Instead of doing something about it, the notion of using bitcoin like money has been abandonded and it's merely a "store of value". That's until people stop valuing it.
Money and payment settlement systems are not the same thing, although you could be forgiven for believing that. I use a credit card for 99% of my transaction volume, and credit cards are not money. The fact that the notional value of the transaction is denominated in dollars doesn't mean I am actually using dollars as the medium of exchange--the exchange is facilitated by a clearinghouse and my individual transaction may not even result in a transfer of money (actual dollars) between parties, if there is an offsetting transaction (or chain of transactions) within the same settlement period.
Bitcoin was originally invented as a "peer to peer electronic cash system". The fees have made it impossible to use it as such for quite some time.
It would have required a radical redesign of bitcoin to even have a chance of success, and that has always been off the table and has been left for new, experimental digital currencies.
Bitcoin has been incapable of doing a hardfork for whatever reason for a while.
That's why it will disappear sooner or later. If you don't evolve, you die.
Can you elaborate on this - why would the core project care how many times it's forked? The forks shouldn't affect the core project at all, that's the whole point of having a fork in the first place. Or alternatively, if you like and use the fork, then you aren't on the core bitcoin chain anymore. Either way the main BTC chain doesn't care.
Some changes (eg. to the block reward schedule) are only possible on a hard fork as it makes the main chain incompatible with the pre-fork chain.
That's the philosophical difference between the projects: ETH is not afraid of hard forks and to this date, they have been uncontested. BTC never considers a hard fork and has had at least two major contested ones.