Quote from: YarkoL on September 25, 2014, 06:35:13 AM

Quote from: NewLiberty on September 25, 2014, 03:54:32 AM

XMR Dev team rose to the challenge of forced evolution in the time available.
They have crafted a polymorphic bitmonerod+client that adds checkpoints at will and with no dev team intervention needed. Its a decentralized self-maintainable solution that scales as needed. Even if you DDoS github, checkpoints can still be deployed.

That's not the case according to the post that you linked

Quote

We will be distributing updated checkpoint files that will continue to protect the blockchain without the need for a full update of the daemon.

If the clients had ability to add checkpoints at will, I believe that would
lead to forking, unless the reorg procedure is fundamentally different from
bitcoin-based coins.

It is no different (other than convenience) from people modifying the code and compiling it. In an open source environment you can't prevent that, nor would attempting to prevent it provide any useful security model in any case.

It will be up to individual nodes to decide what sources to use for these checkpoints (if any). If they rely a source that provides useful checkpoints, the effect will only be to prevent malicious chain reorganization. If they rely on some other source (or their own bad judgement) then yes they may fork their node, just as they almost certainly would if they went messing around the source code without knowing what they are doing.