Why should this "power" include telling other people what software they can or can't run?  If users could do that (and I'm glad they can't) THEN the system has failed.  Users will always have the freedom to decide which chain they wish to transact on.  Why isn't that enough for you?  Why do you want to dictate terms to people who don't owe you a damn thing?



Your use of the word "listening" here distinctly implies not just "hearing" what the community and developers are saying, but also "obeying".  Hence slave.  They listened.  They just didn't agree.  That's allowed.  Deal with it.  Either the alignment of incentives will prove them wrong to disagree, or it won't.  Whichever it turns out to be, most of those miners you currently disagree with will, most likely, eventually be back on the same chain as the majority of users, because the most profitable chain to mine will be the one most people transact on.  And you'll still, most likely, be complaining about how terrible they all supposedly are, despite the fact there's nothing you can do to prevent their involvement.  And even if you could prevent their involvement, you'd have to sacrifice one of Bitcoin's primary tenets of permisionlessness in order to do so.  It's far simpler just to let them get on with whatever the hell they want to do.  You can still run whatever code you want.  Beyond that, you're as impotent as everyone else.



Until 5 minutes pass and they find another boogeyman to plead for someone in authority to "save" us from.  Quite a lot of people are morons in that regard.  It's all getting a bit too overprotective and interfering lately.  Like people who whine about forks having the name "Bitcoin" in them because it might confuse people, or those who would gladly prefer to restrict freedom in the name of supposed security.  Hardly the cypherpunk values Bitcoin was founded upon.



This is most of the people in the thread.  You are all Helen Lovejoy.  Stop it.



I'm not here saying any "side" has any kind of moral high ground.  Both have done stupid, petty crap.  Neither comes out of this looking good.  Again, it takes two to tango, stop pretending any "side" is innocent here.  So going forward, we need to stop having "sides".  We need to stop the polarising fragmentation, the tribalism, the pointless bickering and the incessant baseless character assassinations.

I'm confident Bitcoin will emerge stronger after all this drama blows over and will set a precedent that all the cypherpussies on this board and elsewhere were utterly wasting their time and blood pressure fretting over issues of "control" and "power" in vain.  People will run the code they want to run and the network will move forward accordingly.