Quote from: rpietila on April 29, 2014, 09:25:23 AM

Nope. A cool part of the crypto universe is that anyone can fork the coin (considering he has the majority of the shares/consensus AFTER the fork against hostile groups) to do whatever, and the markets decide if the fork has any value.

I don't believe miners and core developers would like to support such a change, but unless they have the majority of stake in the fork, they don't count. You can decide the parameters of the fork such that they actively suppress the position of devs and miners. Just like you would be designing an altcoin.

Yes, you can create a new coin, but this has nothing to do with the consensus in Bitcoin. The difference between a fork and a new chain is that all wealth gets wiped out. Bitcoins don't have value in a new chain. So what OP is talking about is just nonsense - he is explicitly referring to migrating Bitcoin. The people who hold the 5 billion dollars in wealth have no interest in destroying their wealth. The ASIC miners have no interest in moving to another system. The Bitcoin chain is secured by the hashing power. Which means the wealth can't be destroyed by random judgements of people. This economic calculation is the very reason why Bitcoin works in the first place. Essentially those nodes who would want to change the system would be malicious actors in the network. All of this is really required if you want to understand the system, because otherwise bitcoins would be worthless. The value of bitcoins crucially depends on the self-interest of miners and the tie to the hashing-power. Which is not to say there can be better systems. One might imagine a currency where users actually have a say in development, but Bitcoin is not such a system. Any new algorithm will be an Altcoin, not Bitcoin 2.0.