Re: Bitcoin XT - Officially #REKT (also goes for BIP101 fraud)

I suggest you read Hayek's Road to Serfdom.

Totalitarianism under the urge to follow a "strong" leader by steering the sheeps against a "common enemy" is not giving choice to the market.

Having the requirement in place that 75% of the miners have to agree with this change first is in fact giving the choice to the market, considering that the miners would most likely not implement such a change without the economic majority also being on board as well. Hayek also defined totalitarianism as the desire to organise the whole of society and attain a definite social goal, this is also certainly not the case with XT.

You completely and conveniently ignore what I'm saying. This is a POSSIBLE PATH that could come about IN THE FUTURE. So, saying that it isn't in XT today doesn't counter anything. You are arguing with yourself. Here, I'll agree with you... "what could become the future is not true in the present."

What is factual is the relationship between these possibilities and the XT creator's past proposals. In other words, it is based on what the "benevolent dictator" could do if he had enough control over Bitcoin clients and miner code.

The question isn't whether you have free choice today to not install XT. If you didn't, I wouldn't spend my time typing this. It is whether you can lose that free choice by trusting future releases of XT loaded with its patches (e.g., blacklisting) and other protocol changes.

As a crude comparison, since you are hooked on the tyranny concept, Hitler didn't start out his political campaign with a proposal to exterminate people. He started it with proposals the people wanted to hear... to restore Germany to its former glory and prosperity. Those who trusted him in the beginning began a journey that years later seemed regrettably unstoppable until Germany lost the war. Tyrants can be very benevolent and seemingly benign in the beginning. In 1933, Germany had a choice.

How can we loose that free choice if anyone is free to release an alternate client the same way XT would have. If it get enough support it will simply be adopted.

Hitler political campaign was not an open source project... Or are you are saying that bitcoin can be controlled with the same kind of propaganda tactics?

You are oversimplifying and presuming that the current state of Bitcoin will always be true. Think of XT nodes as an army. If acquire a majority of miners and full nodes, and they change the protocol to have anti-forking measures, your freedom dissipates.

For instance, checkpoints could be used to make fork attempts more difficult, while rogue (non-XT) nodes could be thwarted with blacklists. Who do you know proposed using checkpoints and blacklists?

Of course, this depends on XT obtaining critical mass, and people trusting it long enough to be blindsided before they realize it is too late to turn back the clock. And, this hasn't happened, yet. Let's hope it doesn't.