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.
As to miners, the pool that I tried was DDoS'd and had to stop mining BIP101 blocks. As to nodes the XT node that I was running was DDoS'd. I am no longer running a full bitcoin node.
Do you believe that how bitcoin works should be controlled by terrorist attacks? Do you support "consensus" based on violence and fear?
lol, what a non-argument. terrorism? anyone could mount a DDOS attack on the bitcoin network, regardless of which version (if any) it might target. how is this relevant in any way?
if nodes (wholesale) can't withstand a DDOS attack, bitcoin isn't very robust, is it? indeed, there are various optimizations that could and should be implemented to assist in withstanding DDOS. feel free to contribute code to assist.
if nodes can be DDOSed to the extent that overall node health (and decentralization) are threatened, that has fuck-all to do with "centralization of development." it simply means improvements to the protocol need be made.
if you'd like to run XT, you ought to push Gavin and Hearn (and whoever else may be contributing to XT) to make it far more resilient to DDOS than it is. they are the only ones to blame for its shortcomings. if XT is to be a replacement for Core, it is incumbent on XT developers to address these issues, and all issues that might threaten bitcoin's robustness. i would question whether they are capable of that, especially considering the bugs in XT's implementation.