But polls show that Gavin has a clear majority... its just certain core devs who object and not on technical grounds. And most of them are working for a single organization. How is that "hectoring a community"?
It isn't. Who said that?
There is a difference between "we need a hard fork to increase the block size" and "Gavin's plan is the way to do it, (which ever plan he settles upon)"
Most all the devs want a hard fork to increase block size. Very few are on board with Gavin's plan.
Anyhow, it looks like the Bitcoin Core hard fork will be more likely to progress from gmaxwell's BIP, and the XT fork from Gavins perhaps.
They may remain compatible until there is a block that one would process and the other wouldn't.
You can include me in that contingent: we do need a hard fork to increase the block size (and only for what that will achieve, buying time). Very few people are debating that now, and I myself have been aware of the scalability issue for almost as long as I've been interested in bitcoin.
Re: which designs will be implemented on which fork;
I thought Gavin had decided against the hostile fork?the use of the term hostile is propaganda.
its not hostile, it's only hostile if you are feeling threatened like maybe the majority of Core developer working on another another hard fork and want to leverage block size increase with your proposed improvements.
Telling the entire core dev team, the commercial bitcoin players and the bitcoin user community that if they didn't like it, they were powerless to stop him? This is friendly gesture in your eyes?
I'm not even being rhetorical using the word "hostile", Gavin and Mike's attitude was exactly that: hostile.
That is completely not the situation at all.
Gavin was clear that the intent was to let the bitcoin community decide, by enabling the community to have options they themselves could pick from (bitcoind, bitcoin XT). The reality of the current situation is the core devs have probably put in less than 1% of the coding infrastructure work to get the bitcoin ecosystem to where it is today, but simultaneously get to dictate almost all the terms. That makes no sense for an open platform.
Telling the entire core dev team, the commercial bitcoin players and the bitcoin user community that if they didn't like it, they were powerless to stop him? This is friendly gesture in your eyes?
Gavin simply enables choice, he has no power to force anything with that move. In fact the default no action is for people to stay with the blockstream team. People have to make a concious choice to switch to XT, while the "no vote" segment essentially votes no. The path Gavin offered with XT was in fact probably the hardest to make work simply because of that fact.
I've come to see a single core as being the single greatest threat to Bitcoin out of all of this. A better situation to me would be a bitcoin P2P network with several separately developed cores that adhere to a common set of rules. The upgrade path is then always put to a vote. Any one core could then propose a change simply by implementing it (with a rule that after x% of blocks back the change it becomes active).
Then if people like the change, more will move to that core. This in turn would cause the other core to adopt the change or lose their users, and that is how consensus is achieved. If a majority did not like the change, they would not move to that core, and the change would never be accepted.
At no point in this do any set of gatekeepers get to dictate terms. Since no core has a majority of users captured, change would always have to come through user acceptance and adoption, and developers would simply be proposers of options.