Quote from: Blazr on February 02, 2015, 09:31:46 PM

Obviously you weren't around when they were trying to soft fork for P2SH support. Deepbit (the largest mining pool at the time) outright refused to go ahead with it for similar idiotic reasons as the people that are refusing this blocksize change (which btw has already been changed a couple of times in previous forks without many people voting against). It took a while to convince deepbit but in the end they listened and now there aren't many people at all (if any) who think the P2SH fork (something that was needed to allow for multisig) or even any of the previous forks were a bad idea.

Whoa whoa whoa. It was a bit more nuanced than that. Tycho's argument (from the few conversations I had with him) was that Deepbit had the most hashing power at the time, so it didn't make sense to get his permission first, he would ultimately have to defer to whatever the other mining pools decided or else run on a fork where he made up 51%+ of the hashing power that couldn't be trusted. He knew that ultimately the other pools would have to make a more unanimous decision and then he would follow them.

There's definitely something wrong with the way Gavin went about it, basically asking Tycho to switch (to then force the others to). It was wrong and I hope the separation of miner and development continues for at least a few decades before miners and developers are so embedded with each other we have a repeat of what led to Bitcoin in the first place.