I enjoyed your take on the "religious schism" between Core and XT playing out in fast motion...the inquisition...the banishing of the heretics...etc etc. What I would love to see--although it would be difficult and perhaps infeasible at this point in time--is a scholarly article addressing the politics of Bitcoin governance. How do we come to consensus? What does "consensus" really mean in the context of Bitcoin?
Thanks for the comment... but I would not be qualified to write such a paper, of course. That is a social sciences / psychology / anthropology topic...
By the way, one of the most interesting Scaling conference videos that I saw was the one by Gabriella Coleman. You must have seen that in person, I suppose. She would be the person to write that paper -- if she could be conviced to spend a year or two studying the bitcoin community...
But I think that, as you suggest, bitcoin will need some governmance entity. A good example may be the General Conference on Weights and Measures, that governs the metric system --- a much more critical "protocol" than bitcoin. It has representatives from all countries, typically designated by the local standards bodies. The delegates propose "BIP"s, they debate and ponder, and then eventually decide on "forks" by vote. It has no legal power, but it has considerable moral power; countries and companies will promptly accept its decisions, because "a bad standard is always better than no standard".
Other similar examples are IUPAC (for chemical nomenclature), the UNICODE consortium, ISO, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (that defines the UTC leap seconds), etc.