Quote from: LaggedOnUser on May 14, 2013, 12:31:35 PM

That's true, he is making a black-and-white argument, where I am making a more probabalistic or practical argument. The agreement system of checkpointing is a working agreement system, it just has different practical characteristics than Bitcoin so I don't consider it as a possible stand-alone protocol. It lacks the strength of the original.

I consider it possible as a stand-alone protocol. I also think it is much stronger. See sig.

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Also I see what you're saying about the developers. They could either displease the majority of users, resulting in a permanent fork, or a schism could arise among the developers themselves, also resulting in a permanent fork, although they would have to be convincing to drag a significant number of users with them. So far this has not happened. In all of the forks in the open source world, I don't personally recall any that actually destroyed their project.

This is more than just your average piece of open source software. Developers should not have the power to fracture the community, it isn't good for anyone.