@maaku: Electrum 198 checks eight random Electrum servers for chain length before establishing the trustworthiness of any one instance.

The decision to encase Bitcoin in minimal purity may be technically correct, but I'm personally not interested much in living in the world of today. I want a new world. I can't speak for others, but we have to decentralize everything to get there, and I don't think PhantomPhreak and Xnova are new to worthy goals like this.

I grew up in the age of Napster, and I remember file sharing services being infiltrated early on by those who wished to corrupt the P2P movement. People coming together at large scale is what overpowered it. Bitcoin history runs parallel to P2P history, and so the success of Bitcoin will identically be a question of "people".

Large scale decentralized marketplaces are an essential factor in recruiting people at large to the idea of a decentralized economic system. Consequently I think it is a tactical mistake to become divided on OP_RETURN 80 since it leads to virtually identical network topology, but enables Counterparty and by extension Bitcoin to become massively better at uniting people the world over under a new economic system.