Quote from: kcirazy on August 27, 2013, 05:13:18 PM

Hi all,

In regard of growing interest and the involvement of more and more political parties.

Chances are that within the next few months and/or years we'll be seeing controversial philosophical/political changes being proposed to the protocol that will take effect at a later date or only in specific circumstances. The good thing is, that it's free for everyone, from the miners to the individual nodes, to decide whether they are running it.

There will be campaigns trying to convince the >50%.

Some questions:

Is it possible to measure how divided the installed Bitcoin-software versions actually are?
We already have a wide range of versions of clients and full nodes running. How would we know exactly which source is dominant and which percentage share the other software clients/nodes have?

You wouldn't want a growing share of a 'dangerous' versions of the protocol (distributed by a party whos ideas you don't agree with) and only notice it when it's too late.

For example: Let's say The Bitcoin Foundation decides to implement a version where miners get 25BTC for another 4 years, instead of 12,5BTC to "keep the economy going". And I believe this is absolutely the wrong thing for Bitcoin so I want to sell all my bitcoins if this becomes the bigger network. How would I know whether I should do this?

Well first, there's no way to know for sure. There's a user-agent string passed during handshake. But I could change it to whatever I want. example: /BananaBread:1.0/... Or I could just set it to be the same as the mainline client, or anything else for that matter, and you'd never know whether I was actually using the client I say I'm using.