when i was working on a bitcoin fork called parallelcoin, i built out a whole upgrade for the protocol including a hardfork mechanism, totally redesigned block schedule and difficulty adjustment, and a GUI interface for the wallet and controller

i did most of the work, a little of it was done by my colleague, but it took about 2 years and was early alpha by the end of that period

i think that this is a typical timeline for a decentralised, crowd-sourced protocol as well, i think that nostr is still alpha, mid alpha even, because there is a lot of easy improvements to the protocol at this point that haven't happened yet but many are working in parallel on various parts of it

i think 3 years is how long it takes to get to beta, for a full blown protocol, for one developer to build a system out

there is almost no teams doing dev for nostr, maybe only damus and primal, almost everything else is one man bands, so this kinda dictates the timeline, and part of the reason is that we still don't have an optimal mechanism for sharing our specifications and deciding on how to settle differences between them, it's still hard to even find new proposed ones because there isn't even a convention for how to mark the name of a nip-proposal in the PRs of the nips repo, and some devs have already raced ahead (Stella and her crew, Pablo, and some others) making a wiki protocol, which will sooner or later do it, once enough people get fed up with how slowly the governance is working on the github nips repo

here's the thing:

this is a decentralised protocol

you don't need permission to try something

really you just need relay and client devs working closer together 

 You might know... Would slowing down block times for bitcoin require a hard fork? 

 there's no need for it, or to decrease it, or to increase block size

fee rates tell everything... if they became sticky at over $3/tx in fiat denomination of today then ok, maybe we need to look at it but at this point, no

most shitcoiners still don't get it that bitcoin has avoided a hard fork since 2017 and that was a soft fork, whereas most shitcoin chains hardfork every other month

they are utterly dim and retarded if they don't even think to ask the question "so how did that happen?" and the only thing that has driven the rates up temporarily has been shitcoin tokens on bitcoin, ordinals etc, and none of them have pushed the fee rate up for long, maybe a week and a bit in the worst cases 

 I'm just asking if a hard fork would be necessary.  

 yes, because it changes what constitutes a valid block hash (work) 

 Okay, thanks 

 I read some of your repositories this weekend, especially the relay one, nice code. I’ll read more carefully to learn something