MPOE-PR: Please do think from what I posted above that I defend the decision to forcibly accept the 0.7 fork and abandon the 0.8 fork, in violation of the bitcoin protocol's founding principle that greater hashing power always wins a dispute. Nobody asked me, of course, since I am neither developer nor mining pool manager. But as I see it, the final decision had two strong drawbacks and one weak upside.

The first strong drawback is that the decision forced a patch on clean efficient code (0.8 ) to conform to buggy slow code (0.7). In my experience this is never a good idea over the long pull.

Second, the decision burned up developers' political influence. A handful of developers used their deservedly high community respect to force a decision on the 0.8 miners. So be it. But the next emergency will see developer influence greatly reduced in consequence.

The weak upside? The decision prevented thousands of 0.7 users suffering crashes as their wallets choked on the offending block. This would have forced users around the world to stop dithering and upgrade to 0.8 immediately. So? What would have been wrong with that?