> small technical change to a protocol

Given the fuss that Bitcoin Core itself makes about this change not being possible, it is surely not a trifling matter.

This is disingenuous, anyhow. The limit on how many transactions the Bitcoin network can handle is fundamental to growth, of course it would be a big issue.

> All anyone has to do is read the pro-fork subreddit, /r/btc, and see how toxic and hostile they seem. It does not seem genuine and I cannot imagine anyone spending so much time writing the same things over and over for nearly a year.

This is what happens when a group is cast out from the main community (in this case by moderation policy).

> small technical change to a protocol

I have no horse in this race, but isn't that understating the impact a bit?

Yes, the pro-fork group say they simply want to change the limit of megabytes per block from 1MB to 2MB. Somehow this is worth forking the network over.

This may not sound like much, but also keep in mind eight months ago it was 20MB, with an eventual jump into the GB range, that they were pushing for. Also, recently they are talking about removing any limit altogether.

This change seems small but the consequences would not be, since it limits who can run a full client and centralizes control to those who can (companies, not individuals).

There are better ways to achieve the same goal and keep the decentralization, but they are not so simple, and need to be fully tested before rolling out. One exciting thing in the pipeline, is a caching layer that sits on top of bitcoin, which allows instant, true microtransactions. In the short term there's "segwit" which also brings all sorts of other advantages.

Honest Question: As an individual what incentives are there for me to run a full node? Currently the storage/bandwidth requirements are not outrageous, but high enough that they will cost $20-$50 depending on how many connections I allow. Why would I bother?

It's possible to run a node in pruned mode, where you set the amount is space which is used by blocks. Older blocks are then pruned to stay within the space limit. You can run a node in this way for $5 a month.

If you support Bitcoin, much in the same way as people support many open source projects, this isn't a lot of money to fork out. Compared to the amount of time contributors spend writing software for free for the good of the world.

I recently had to wait several hours for a transaction to confirm, this materially effected me.

People actually using bitcoin wanted the 2MB increase months ago.