Quote from: Zangelbert Bingledack on March 13, 2015, 06:01:25 PM

Quote from: rocks on March 13, 2015, 02:00:12 AM

But on the other hand the more easy and accustomed to forks bitcoin becomes, the easier it is for regulation to push a fork towards some type of FEDCoin.

If they can fork Bitcoin to their liking while not destroying its major selling points, more power to them and I'll even invest in their fork, but I don't think that's possible. The changes the government would demand would make it orders of magnitude less valuable and most of the current economic majority would stay with Bitcoin Classic. They could grow FEDCoin larger than Bitcoin, more valuable, etc., but Bitcoin would still have its uses - precisely those uses that were neutered in FEDCoin.

In summary, government-sponsored forks aren't a threat to Bitcoin. In fact they would probably just help, because they would get the general public familiar with the ins and outs of crypto, such as security. Then there's Bitcoin with its ex-hypothesi better features.

The problem with goverment forks is if they get 99% of the public to use the fork (which is likely), the original system becomes irrelevant even if a few diehards stick to it.

Take gold and the FED's original gold backed dollar. The FED's original dollar was a government fork of gold as money. Gold coins offered many benefits from security, irreversible transactions, privacy, fixed stable value, etc. The gold backed dollar was a fork from mother nature in a sense, and they promoted a variety of benefits including easier transactions, etc.

Even after the FED broke all promises and broke the dollar's ties to gold, there were so few people willing to still use gold as money in daily transactions that gold never regained its true value.

A government fork of bitcoin would do the same thing to bitcoin as the paper gold dollar did to gold, make it irrelevant, not used and valueless. Sure there would be some holdouts who refuse to follow the fork, but they wouldn't be enough to maintain a functional market. Just as the gold bugs weren't enough to maintain gold's role as money or value in society.

That's one of my fears for the project. The harder and less common we make forks to implement, then the harder this attack vector becomes.