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.Totalitarianism under the urge to follow a "strong" leader by steering the sheeps against a "common enemy" is not giving choice to the market.
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?
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.
If XT where to add such features than people would still need to choose to download and install the new implementation that has these changes. People can not be blindsided in this case and it will never be to late to turn back the clock so to speak. It seems like you might not understand the mechanism that prevents such tyranny from forming within Bitcoin in the first place. Which in part is actually the ability to hard fork away from any development team be it XT or Core. It would be better to learn to love the fork.
It's obvious you'll never come around as you are just here to promote XT. Nevertheless, I'll address this tired underlying assumptions that "people would still need to choose to download and install the new implementation" somehow magically protects Bitcoin for generations to come:
False assumption #1: Everyone who downloads the program completely understands the code.
The vast majority of people do not understand the code, and most are not programmers. Most of us, even those of us who program and can read code, downloaded and ran Core without having any idea about the details of what it does. (e.g., does it log IP addresses?) The reason I take time to post on this forum about the risks of XT is so people can make a more informed decision, and if they decide to install XT, will at least hopefully be wise enough to question each upgrade. Ditto for Core upgrades. Hopefully, discussion like this help broaden awareness of the risks of new code.
False assumption #2: Those who do have a better understanding of the features of the program they download are guaranteed to understand the implications of those features.
The reality is that unless they do understand the implications, they are likely to take the purpose of the code at face value for what its author claims it will do. Undoubtedly, there are some who installed XT who feel protected from DoS attacks because of the patch Mike put in it. Unfortunately, had they read the thread with the Core devs when they rejected it, they would of known that (a) the only claim of a Tor attack was on Gavin's node with no evidence that any other node ever had an attack via Tor, (b) neither Gavin nor Mike provided logs or other evidence of the attack when the Core devs requested it, (c) the Core devs listed many reasons why most DDoS attacks are likely to come from non-Tor sources, (d) even Mike acknowledged that innocent Tor users would be harmed by it and (e) when the attack came from likely non-Tor sources, only Tor would effectively be blocked, not the DoS sources it was supposedly intended to counter. Additionally, (f) this is intended to evolve, and could evolve with enough critical mass combined with XT whitelisting to make it very difficult to unseat XT as the primary code for Bitcoin nodes.
Does the XT website discuss any of this? No. Not only does it ignore all concerns raised by the Core team, Mike has even publicly made statements about the process in which this patch was rejected by Core that very deceptively try to make the Core team look like the bad guys but conveniently leave out the truth of why Core rejected it. Fortunately, the dialog between the Core devs and Mike on his pull request is very public for those interested in reading it.
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/6364