It's pretty shameful that we aren't doing enough to combat such misinformation and that they actually felt the need to defend their entirely justified actions.  Hats off to the FUDsters, they're doing a better job than I realised of shitstirring and rocking the boat.  Now if more of us could actually stand up to the farcical notion that a fork proposal is some kind of power grab and generally reduce the amount of ignorance we're seeing on this topic, that would be great.


Points to remember:

• If you want to use an open source coin, that means anyone can modify that code and submit their own version under another name.
• Such actions are not an attack on the system and actually prevent the possibility of a single group having permanent control over development.
• Successfully forking with an alternative client does not give those developers any special power or diktat to enforce future changes on the network.
• Assuming that Core developers are the only permanent authority on what Bitcoin "is" or "should be" is an extremely dangerous mindset.
• Consensus is not a group of developers agreeing, because the people securing the network make the decisions, not the developers.

If you believed wholeheartedly that the choice you made was the right one, but everyone else disagreed and prevented you from doing it, should people really hold it against you if you made a comment that being a benevolent dictator would simply the process?  It doesn't mean he actually wants to be a benevolent dictator, it means he got fed up of the other devs dragging their heels and made an off-the-cuff comment out of frustration.  If a fork does go ahead, it doesn't give him any special powers to make further changes.  There are no dictators who have that power.  Every change has to be supported by those securing the network or the change doesn't happen.  Simple.