Gavin has shown himself not trustworthy of this key. His influence over Bitcoin anyway has long started to fade anyway. What has he done for us lately?
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Gavin's influence is fading, but we have to stop him from having influence by taking away his key".
Way to contradict yourself yet again. I can see you're going to be a source of much entertainment.
It is primarily a matter of trust, not influence. These keys should not be in the hands of any random derp who has resorted to trolling fellow developers on Twitter
It is also a matter of influence. The ability to make almost everyone stop using Bitcoin until they take some action on a scary sounding emergency could be very useful if (not when) some new hostile takeover attempt is triggered.
Slamming the ecosystem into a 'benevolent dictator' mode of management is bad enough. When said 'benevolent dictator' has a long track record of wanting to centralize the solution to 4 or 6 copies of the blockchain worldwide and 'white/black/red-list' coins to 'help the community' overcome certain problems, it would almost certainly be curtains for the solution in Satoshi's original form. A well timed 'alert' could be the difference between success or failure of such an attempt.