Quote from: theymos on January 29, 2014, 09:48:37 AM

Quote from: bloods-n-cryptos on January 29, 2014, 02:09:28 AM

First, thanks for the informed response as I cannot get into Satoshi's mind to learn his intent for using the MIT/X11 license.

That said, I read the thread and am confused when I reread your response (or think you may be confused).

Are you claiming that Satoshi chose the MIT/X11 License (over GPL) so people would not create alt-coins by rewriting the main Bitcoin client? That's what your response in the context of my quote seems to imply. I could find nothing of the sort in the Satoshi thread you quoted as he seemed to be discussing the creation of another Bitcoin client that would utilize the same Bitcoin blockchain and makes no mention of alternate blockchains.

Aside from Satoshi's intent re MIT/X11 license, do you believe that there does in fact exist only one (1) official Bitcoin?

The point of the quote I posted is to disprove your claim that Bitcoin is MIT-licensed because Satoshi wanted altcoins. He gave his real reason there: he didn't see any point in forcing people to duplicate his effort in creating a Bitcoin client. (If you read many more of his posts, you'll see that he also wanted Bitcoin-Qt to remain the main Bitcoin client for the foreseeable future. He didn't want competing clients destabilizing the network.) He didn't say anything about promoting competition, decentralization, etc.

Satoshi was not a huge champion of decentralization. He viewed the Bitcoin network as being equal to his Bitcoin software, and he tightly controlled all code changes to this software. In several cases, he secretly changed some of the core Bitcoin rules in ways that would nowadays cause absolute outrage. For example, the 1 MB block size limit didn't always exist. He snuck that in along with some other changes without announcing it or asking anyone's opinion. Don't get me wrong: Bitcoin itself is very decentralized due to Satoshi's work, but if Satoshi returned, everyone complaining about current centralization issues would find him to be much worse. So your "appeals to Satoshi" are ridiculous.

On this forum, there is only one Bitcoin. Elsewhere, you can define things however you wish.

To be fair, I just wanted clarification on whether it was your position that Satoshi utilized the MIT/X11 license so people would not create alternate blockchain clients, which, contrary to your post, you clarified was not your actual position. Correct?

Other than that, I think you are correct that my romanticizing Satoshi's intent regarding his choice of MIT/X11 open-source may have been misplaced. That said, that statement was dicta to my original point that this forum perpetuates the legal falsehood/legal myth/legal fiction that there is indeed one official Bitcoin in the legal sense. If you take out the statement re Satoshi, the rest of my post holds true.

To be clear, this site has the right to perpetuate whatever it wants and to protect its interest it may even have a duty to do so. I was just making a point that this forum perpetuates a legal falsehood that there is an official Bitcoin in the legal sense. Similarly, this site could ban all users that use alt-coins "as scammers for copying the original Bitcoin source-code." Again, this forum can perpetuate whatever it wants but that is a separate issue from whether the forum is perpetuating a fiction in the legal sense.

Once more, your point is well taken and I concede that I may have misspoke concerning Satoshi's intent, dicta or not. Thanks for the thought-out response theymos.

On a side note, I went through Satoshi's post here on Bitcointalk but I couldn't find anything from him against the creation of alternate blockchains.
I checked here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=3;sa=showPosts.
Is there a way to access the archives of the old forums which used to be here: http://bitcoin.sourceforge.net/boards/index.php