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

Chain forks or "altforks" are indeed sometimes justified in order to avoid the danger of centralization of power that can develop within a Core development team.

you repeating these misnomers just makes you look foolish. Core developers don't have any power; that's the beauty of the open source decentralized protocol that they are developing. at any time, miners and nodes can throw their weight behind a different version, developed by anyone. they have zero power to control anyone's actions. you and other XT fanboys are just upset that miners and nodes do not support other versions. i suspect the reason that only a tiny minority of loud developers shares your view that "Core is centralized" is that developers by and large have a much more sophisticated understanding of the technical issues, and therefore don't see a "civil war" of sorts as necessary. they'd prefer to continue to collaborate effectively on the bitcoin project; it was clear for many, many months that Hearn became disinterested in collaboration since no one was receptive to his ideas. since bitcoin is open source and development is indeed decentralized, he took the liberty (as anyone can) to fork the code.

and you know what? miners and nodes didn't support his fork. boo hoo. he proved just how decentralized bitcoin development is -- no one controls the code -- and even temporarily garnered some limited support for his fork. but it failed. and the idea that it could achieve 75% hashing power at this point is laughable. if nodes and miners do not support alternative versions, that is not evidence to say that "centralization of development" exists. it only says that unpopular versions are unpopular.

if you believe that a significant portion of miners and nodes will support an alternative version, go develop it. not a developer? well, too bad. because crying about "centralization" when you've no idea what it means won't make the alternative versions you think are so important magically appear. and it certainly doesn't provide any evidence that there is "centralization of power within the Core development team."

I argued that centralization of power can develop within the Core development team, I have not argued that this is presently the case. I do argue however that having the ability to hard fork away from a core development team if we need to is an important mechanism of Bitcoin that allows Bitcoin to remain decentralized and truly free. Based upon what you have said here I would think that you would at least agree with this conception.

how can centralization of power develop, in this context? i argue that it cannot. there is no power. this greatly differs from the protocol-level discussion where the various parties hold some level of power to hold the others accountable (e.g. nodes have the power to enforce the protocol and render a miner's fork invalid). these incentive-induced checks and balances have absolutely fuck-all to do with developers. development is completely external to the protocol, and developers have zero power to enforce code on anyone. all this "centralization" talk in the context of development is a silly red herring to confuse simple-minded people who take the word at face-value without thinking about it.

bitcoin is not closed source. that's the only instance in which developers can hold any power over users, nodes and miners. otherwise the latter parties can simply audit the code and opt to run another version.