Re: The Barry Silbert segwit2x agreement with >80% miner support.
Well if we're quoting Falkvinge on Segwit, we may as well reference his better work, such as his synopsis of Satoshi Roundtable:
http://falkvinge.net/2017/01/26/impressions-satoshi-roundtable-iii/
In a speaking slot of mine, I stood up and made the observation that we (people in the room) are acting like a Toyota boardroom who are trying to make a decision that every family should buy the latest Toyota model. It doesnt work like that, I said. Were not the Soviet Politburo commanding a planned economy. The reality of the situation is that weve made the market an offer, and the market is rejecting our offer. I made the point that thinking the market should behave differently, no matter how good your reasons, is not going to make the market behave differently in the slightest. The Toyota boardroom doesnt get to decide what car a family should buy, and the present company does not get to decide what code miners run on their own machines. The world isnt fair, but instead of complaining about it, play the cards youve got on your hand. Give your client what they want and you both benefit.
I think that quote nails this whole year-long agonizing about Segwit perfectly, and in hindsight will be the Bitcoin history books.
The third Satoshi Roundtable has just concluded in Cancún, Mexico. The Roundtable is a private gathering of 100 movers and shakers within the bitcoin industry, with no media present, and its held under Chatham House rules meaning everybody can use the information shared at the meeting, but never disclose who said what or their affiliation.
Same as The Bilderberg Group. Secrecy can not be permitted in decentralised environment.
This right here bothers me severely! Why in the hell are we replicating the same power structures that we purportedly seek to destroy. *Sigh*
This illustrates the failed decentralization of bitcoin. One shouldn't "complain" that people are having secret gatherings. If those secret gatherings have any potential EFFECT, it means that bitcoin was prone to collusion (and hence wasn't decentralized) in the first place.
Complaining about this is a bit like complaining that you have a cryptographic protocol, but that there are people having secret meetings about how they can crack your cryptographic system. If you are to be afraid about people trying secretly to crack your system, then it means that your crypto system is worthless. If a system claimed to be decentralized has to fear the "secret gathering of a few hundreds of individuals", then it is not decentralized.
Just as with cryptography, one should say: "try to collude as much as you can, try to modify bitcoin to your hand, the more you do so, and the more you fail, the more you prove that our concept of our system is working correctly, because it was designed to resist exactly that".
The big failure of bitcoin is that its protocol is made such that it NEEDS to be modified, which can only be obtained by breaking its resistance to power (that is, the ability of some to change its rules). So bitcoin will fail technically (because of block limit) unless it fails conceptually (because centralized and power structure).
The secret meeting isn't the problem but this is, "but never disclose who said what or their affiliation."
One of the rules.
Q. How is the Rule enforced?
A. Chatham House will take disciplinary action against a member or guest who breaks the Rule; this is likely to mean future exclusion from all institute activities including events and conferences. Although such action is rare, the rigorous implementation of the Rule is crucial to its effectiveness and for Chatham Houses reputation as a trusted venue for open and free dialogue.
Disciplinary action -
. What next disciplinary against against miners/users/developers. Who is going to be the judge and jury of dishing out disciplinary action in a decentralised environment. It's all rather comical.