Bitcoin Forum

The real problem isn't XT.  The real problem is that there is no good means to break a serious impasse. 

XT is a tiny problem - many alternatives exist to get bitcoin to scale.  But XT taught us one thing, Bitcoin is extremely fragile when the core devs can't naturally reach agreement in conversation. 

This XT thing will soon blow over and with or without a fork - Bitcoin will go on in good shape. But, someone ought to start thinking about the next thing which will cause a division.  A division which gets a real durable 50%/50% opinion going will destroy Bitcoin I think. 

XT is probably going to win this argument in about 1 hour after the hard fork.  The next round of disagreement probably won't end up the same way. 

We really need Satoshi to sign a tie-breaking message once in a while.  He is a real coward for checking out like he did.  jk

Hey Sato - how about giving the community a little guidance -  eh?  Just a little 'pip' once in a while.  How about if you sign a '1' for yes on XT or a '0' for no on XT?  That would sure help.  Now that Mike invoked your name, it really does fall on you. 

Satoshi would have weighed in if he thought he should.

I think we wants to see if Bitcoin will succeed without his intervention.

Just like Charles Lee for Litecoin, bitcoin should be able to stand on its own two feet without its founder.

Truly decentralized.

Satoshi almost certainly died a few years ago.

Regardless, I really don't understand why people care what he would think anyhow.

If you knew who first created the hammer, would you care what his opinion is about how you want to use one?

If you knew who first created the wheel, would you care whether or not they want you to use the wheel on your new method of transportation?

Maybe "he" has weighed in.

Do you really think that Satoshi would keep his voice out of this? And if so, do you think he could voice his opinion under the moniker "Satoshi" and maintain any sense of normalcy in his/her life? I doubt it. It's much more plausible that Satoshi is active among us and operating under a different name.

It's the way it should be...it's the way I'd do it.

He is the only person that when voicing his opinion in this matter, could actually be considered unbiased,
since he was the creator and in theory would make the best choice for Bitcoin/bitcoin, and not for himself.

His decision in this matter, if 100% verified to be him, would end the debate immediately, IMO.

But, as I have said many times, I believe he is no longer living as well.

One man should never have that much power.

Satoshi comes off as a brilliant man, women or group.  They will never return, their opinion is now regarded as gods opinion.. such power is bad.

Satoshi created bitcoin for the people, Satoshi can no longer be involved, Bitcoin cannot have one person/group that decides it's future.

It's not Bitcoin that's fragile per se, just the current prevailing, yet warped, concept of open-source that makes it appear so.  The fact that Bitcoin is both open-source and a consensus mechanism means that anyone can not only read the code, but also alter it and make their own clients with their own custom rules to govern the network.  However, these rules only come into being if enough users securing the network agree with them.  This is more powerful than most people realise.  

Anyone perceiving an alternate client with a fork proposal as a threat, or worse still, calling it an attempt at a coup or dictatorship, or thinking that all the core devs have to agree all the time has fundamentally misunderstood the concept of open-source decentralisation.  Just because the majority of the users securing the network agree that Bitcoin Core is the correct rule set to govern the network at the moment, it does not mean that this will always be so.  Being a developer for Bitcoin Core does not grant you any special power or authority over the network, nor should it.  

The definition of "consensus" in Bitcoin is not a single group of developers agreeing on a rule and the network enforcing it without question.  The true meaning of consensus is that any developer can propose a rule and the network chooses whether to enforce it or not.  Ergo, Bitcoin is inherently resistant to authoritarianism.  It would be incredibly difficult for a single developer to seize control or enforce rules that the majority disagree with.  It's actually quite beautiful and I can't wait for the rest of the world to catch on.  If politics and governance works in a similar fashion at some point in the future, we might have something that actually resembles the democracy we are supposedly meant to live in.

This right here is why I believe we will never hear from Satoshi again, Satoshi's point of view will override everyone else at this point.  No matter his purposal, no man should have that type of power.

I believe Satoshi also believes this thus will never be heard from again. At least not as Satoshi.

I agree with you. I was just responding to DannyHamilton's statement.
Many users would want this whole situation to be resolved amicability and for the good of the system,
but only Satoshi's single word could actually do that.
Since that is very likely not to happen for many different reasons, including what you stated above,
we are all going to spin in circles until something bad happens.

I wish I knew What the hell XT is, so i would have had a clue about the drama going on nowadays.

All I know is, there are some miners decided to fuck the original bitcoin up. (may not be true, that is my impression about the subject)

Do you really wish you knew?

If so, contact me, and I'll explain it all to you.

However, I suspect that's just a rhetorical statement made solely for the purposes of getting enough posts for your sig ad campaign, and that you really don't care enough about it to put in any time or effort to learn.

I agree, Satoshi wanted bitcoin to succeed on it own, without needing a central person or organization and that is decentralization.

There will always be people for a choice and people against it.. Heck, look in the politics of your country.. Nobody will ever have a majority of the votes, simply because that is not how humans work...

I care what he would think because the guy had pretty decent insights when it comes to cryptocurrency.  I could give a shit what he thinks about how to use a hammer.  I don't think he is god, but he certainly did have some appreciable thought on this topic. 

Look - today we have no good solution for deciding an impasse.  A fucking hard fork is pretty dumb.  But that is what we are going to use to settle it.  We could flip a coin.  Or, we could let a guy who had some nice organized thinking on the topic send us a blessed message (signed of course) and go with that.

So, Danny-boy, which do you prefer: hard fork, coin toss, or a signed bit from our mutual buddy ol' Sato?

Sorry to hurt your beliefs, but I don't think Satoshi is THE expert anymore on Bitcoin.

Bitcoin has grown since he left, being it the code base or the adoption. I am also sure, that is what he wanted, when he left.

Sorry to hurt your beliefs, but I don't believe that.

Who holds the belief that Satoshi is THE expert?  Not me.  I am just saying I'd trust his tie break vote more than a coin toss.  ...or Mike's hard fork.  

Look, here is the deal.  We don't have a conflict resolution scheme.  When we set down the path to resolve an impasse - we are forced to do a hard fork.  Oh fuck.  That is not good.  For now, I'd let a signed message from Satoshi decide.  Then, start working on a new voting system which would let impasses get settled without walking near the cliff that hard forks are.  

If you want Satoshi to decide, means you hold his word over every other. In my book, that means you think, that he is THE expert, regardless of if you want it just for this conflict.
It also seems to me, that you don't know, what a hardfork is. There already where hard forks. There even was a hard fork about a month ago: BIP 66, which let to some problems (http://cointelegraph.com/news/114794/miners-lost-over-50000-from-the-bitcoin-hardfork-last-weekend)

I believe that Bitcoin will beat this division, but I am also worried as you are about the future problems, and future possible divisions. And there will be problems since Bitcoin is very young and need to progress a lot.

This is honestly a huge question for me, if we are stuck at this little stream, how will we cross future bigger streams.

I am also afraid that Bitcoin has grown too big and that is paying and paying big time its decentralization nature, people are just having hard time to agree.

Oh well, only time will tell!

I think Satoshi and Variety Jones is the same guy and had passed away.The problem is not whether he is alive or not.Sato has completed his mission.If BTC needs to be decentralized.If this will have a cost we have to pay it.Otherwise the BTC will self terminate.Situation is that serious.

Bitcoin has no problem, it is some of the dev's mindset having problem: They don't want to look at the big picture and try to reach over 90% consensus as much as possible (by making some compromise), instead they insist on their own view and try to politicize the change and split the community. Luckily, bitcoin is totally free to participate, every non-sheeple would use their own brain to make a choice

Why don't they leave it as it is?Or they can ask members to vote for or against.

"Bitcoin XT" vs "1MB for ever"

This is blasphemy  :-\

I don't belive hour great leader is dead... no I WON'T belive our great leader is dead
He is still there watching us. I think he will step in if bitcoin will get in real danger.

For now is everthing ok. We have nothing to worry about the XT will slowly fade away and die.

I know what a hard fork is you plonker - and I am about to stick one in your fucking eye.  This XT thing very likely could lead to a hard fork.  Some hard forks just happen no big deal.  This one is a big deal because it is intentional and done with the purpose of shutting out the guys on the other side of the argument.  That is a big fucking deal. 

How can you call him our great leader? He has stepped down and it is time you accept that truth.. His voice is now like yours or mine..

Stupid, Satoshi does not give bitcoin value. Ppl utilize it gives it value . in other words if the economic majority of bitcoin has to take words of an authoritive figure they should drop bitcoin and go back to fiat.

Shocking that so less ppl on this forum actilually understand the fundamental bitcoin.

Stupid, did I say Satoshi gave bitcoin its value? I didn't say anything, that you are saying I said.
Are you drunk or just a troll? Maybe you are a bot.
Shocking that so many people talk in txt speak or spell incorrectly as common practice, on this forum.

XT already lost.  The three largest mining pools in China, who own 30% of the hash rate, have already publicly said they're not willing to switch to XT.

Good.  Thank F that's over.

Average block is only around 500kb right now, so there's still loads of time to come to a solution and consensus regarding blocksize before we reach the 1MB limit.

XT will take 75% in about two weeks.  You'll see.

I doubt it. They don't have significant number of notes to force it, they may be in control of 10% notes or something like that. And I think miners won't join XT. In the future maybe, not now.

So I'm back to fiat then?  Get F'd if you think I'm using HearnCoin.  He can take his blacklists, and shove them.

It does not matter who invented fire, as soon as the technology is found, it is irrelevant what the inventor want for its future. Nobel invented dynamite but he can't stop people from using his technology to kill each other  ;D

i remember that they said they are not against the 8mb change, so they are waiting that the change is incorporated in core or something?

or like everyone else they are waiting for this magical alternative...

Bitmain has announced a new product, a new router, R1.I think it is related with BitcoinXT.What do you think?
I also wonder how do we know the three big BTC mine farms attitude.Do they have an announcement or any thread in any forum?Is there any proof that they do not support.If there is no proof members must write I believe/think otherwise there will be infollution.

This is the kicker... We have two guys, who had some influence and it was given away to the new lead developer. Now they want it back... It's nice to have a little power.

The only way for them to have that power again, would be to take it from the people with a hostile take over. {Hard fork - BitcoinXT} Then they will have their own little kingdom to run as they see fit.

The controversial answer to this problem :
Create a global Bitcoin developer group, represented by the most talented Bitcoin engineers and get them together to vote on these issues. {Yes it is a centralized group, but it's better than the chaotic situation we

have now... where nobody makes a discision and others wants to make the decisions, and when they get frustrated, they want to go on their own crusade against Bitcoin.

It's not the ideal solution, but it's much better than what we have now. {consensus my ass}

There is no "serious impasse."  Bitcoin has just started working more like it was designed to, with RBF and (fledgling) fee pressure/markets.

If there were a "serious impasse" (such that competitive fees no longer properly prioritized their tx, thus endangering the present and future value of BTC), the economic consensus would quickly coalesce around a solution.

If you want to know what Satoshi thinks, look here: https://twitter.com/NickSzabo4.

Don't worry, soon it will be easy to make Ethereum contracts to vote on this sort of thing  ;D

Yeah, to my understanding, absolutely everyone agrees that blocksize will need to increase in the future.  The mining pools in China have simply stated they want consensus amongst the core developers, not Mike and Gavin to try forcing a hard fork down everyone's throats, like they're doing.

Bitcoin is still a long ways off from having any type of issues due to the 1MB blocksize limit, so there's still loads of time to reach a consensus, and roll out a proper hard fork.  Mike and Gavin though and hyping this issue to make it seem like we're in panic times and need to act urgently, which just isn't true.  The bitcoin network will continue humming along just fine with the 1MB blocksize limit for a good while to come yet.

No, you don't know, what a hardfork is. The other hardforks, where also intentional. You should read up here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hardfork

That is not true.
There are people who think, that the blockchain is an exclusive club and the dirty peasants should use centralized solution(I read exactly that many times on this forum, ok, without the "dirty peasants")
Here is a survey that shows, that even two well-known Bitcoin developer are against any increase: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1144606.0

what it XT ??
whether it be very influential in bitcoin ??

Unfortunately, it seems that it does.

And this whole thing is just childish, and the attitude coming from the developers (both sides) is hurting Bitcoin.
If they cannot come to an agreement about something like this, what will happen when something truly serious comes up?

Well done, we have proven to all enemies of Bitcoin that Bitcoin will be destroyed from the inside.
No need for them to bother.

Well I think the argument is people can choose which one they want to use. Want bigger blocks? Then change. Dont? Then don't


YEah there's no evidence to suggest he's dead (though of course it's still a possibility).

*sigh*

No.  Just no.

Developer infighting is not "hurting Bitcoin".  The only thing that comes even remotely close to hurting Bitcoin right now is that no one seems to understand that the core developers are not an authority and they don't have to agree because it's not their decision anyway.  I addressed this in my previous post (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1155088.msg12167208#msg12167208).

Patient is running thin with these idiots. I'm doubting any of them actually understand bitcoin at all!

I see people constantly talking about vote, this indicated that they don't understand the fundamental difference between a decentralized system and a centralized one

Only in a centralized system, you have to vote in order to force everyone to accept the same rule. In a decentralized system, if part of the participants do not agree with others, they could just fork and start to drive their own project. This is very natural and healthy, and even create some kind of competition
between forks

If you are a normal user, the fork does not affect you too much. However, if you are a serious investor or large industry miner or large exchange, your choice will involve some kind of risk, that's the reason large actors should all make some research on the topic, do their own risk judgement and do not blindly listen to core devs

In worst case, a fork double the amount of bitcoin in existence (core coin and XT coin, both 21 million, total 42 million), bitcoin price cut by half or more. And people will understand any fork is an inflation in bitcoin ecosystem and will reduce the long term credibility of this whole concept. Anyway, it is still better than FED creating 5x more money in a couple of years

IMO it 's better to have divisions, divisions are inherent to decentralization. Even with a guidance there will be divisions.

I would argue that bitcoin is designed to fork when these kinds of problems arise.  If the development team isn't doing what the community wants the miners can overthrow them by adopting new software.  Its part of the consensus driven model.  Miners have a strong incentive to agree with each other.  I would expect any major fork to be resolved with a day. If bitcoin can't overcome this problem it will never work in the long term anyway.  With that said I think we really need to have a better development system that can resolve these problems more quickly.

The worst-case scenario for the currency is that both Bitcoin XT and Bitcoin core continue to exist alongside each other for a long period of time, with neither fully seizing the mantle of the true heir to Nakamoto’s vision. In such a situation, the currency’s uncertain future could prove permanently damaging to its prospects.

But even if the change goes through relatively quickly, some inattentive users could find themselves out of pocket. Once the block sizes increase (which won’t happen until January 2016, and then only if 75% of the miners have switched to Bitcoin XT), the two versions of bitcoin will be incompatible. Transactions made on one version of bitcoin would not be reflected on the other, essentially rendering null any attempts to spend bitcoin on the “losing”fork after that date.

it's the upcoming fork or an upgrade call it like you want, that will increase the already bad drama about bitcoin vs xt, it will be influent only if the fork it will actually occur, and for this to happen they need 75% of consensus, as far as i know, otherwise it's like XT never happened


if this can double the amount of coins in existence, what stop someone else, one day from bringing another fork with another new name GX or like that, and rising again the cap of bitcoin, isn't this an attempt to increase the cap in disguise, with the excuse to increase the transaction block limti as well?

Exactly this, this can open a Pandora box. If the division is to happen and we end up with 2 Bitcoins, then I think in 10 years, we could possibly have 10 different Bitcoins.

Division is the worst possible way for this to end and I hope it doesn't end like this. Either we will all be on the core in 6 months or we will all update to XT if they reach 75%, otherwise we will start something that will burn many people. That would be yet another Bitcoin drama that would hurt us all.

or the core devs come back to reality and increase the blocksize to 4-5 MB (+25% increase p.a.) . i guess most people would stay with core in that case.

For a division to work, each coin must have its own complete ecosystem, e.g. enough hash power, enough merchant support, enough exchange support, wallet service provider etc... It is kind of situation like bitcoin and litecoin, but with a slight difference: Both chain use the same algorithm. This means, the chain that have larger hash power can easily double spend on the other chain, thus make it useless. However, even the smaller chain have less than 40% of total hash power, it is still larger than half of the larger chain, so it could easily fight back and cause same damage. So eventually it is a politics about gaining majority of the miner's support, which makes chinese miners a target for lobbying

Again, you never need politics to decide the answer of 1+1, politics only becomes necessary when things has reached a very complex level. So far bitcoin is relatively simple, so it is important to keep it simple to not make it a victim of politicians

Your logic is so flawed i'm stunt.

Go blame every single crypto project then, because you know what it takes away the capital which would have been into Bitcoin.

You might want to start with your sidechain supporters.

The economic incentives dictates noone want to shoot their own golden goose. Bitcoin wouldnt have worked if your scenario can happen.

Game theory 101

Btw, your scenario is exactly the "worst case" that Mike said in the video chat interview " technical mess" he said. To prevent such attacks, having checkpoints and ignoring the longest chain are the only viable defense mechanism.

Sadly, his words got twisted around and misunderstood by a bunch of idiots, who are also quickly against BitcoinXT and call him dictator.

In this case, you are not shooting your own golden goose, but the competitor's, and make your eggs sell better. It is strange that even Mike and Gavin know such kind of risk is high, they still go ahead with their plan to prepare a fork which brings high uncertainty

I don't know how long they have been fighting each other, but that kind of thing is a norm among a group of decision makers in large organizations. But since bitcoin is not a centralized organization, this traditional way of working is outdated

In fact this revealed one weakness of bitcoin is its centralization of the development, so maybe we should set one dynamic blocksize rule and forbid any future change in protocol to permanently remove this political risk. Gold never changed its property for thousands of years, that's the reason it can be trusted

75% of hash power would be a good indicator whos the winner.

You're assuming the rest of 25% decide to burn all their capital because .... they're not having it their ways. Right.

Businesses only care one thing : return on investment. Miners are simply rewarded for their services.

There are reasonable arguments on both sides of the block size debate.

Given that the issue is not urgent, I think the core team has taken the right approach. Bitcoin eventually needs to scale to more than 7 transactions per second but there is no compelling reason to rush out a fix.

Even if XT gained 80% of hash power, bitcoin is going to crash, because more and more people will leave, as they understand this is just another version of USD with another group of dictators

It seems you are not a miner. Industry scale miners are essentially distributed central bank of bitcoin monetary system, they usually have the best possible knowledge and also the wealthiest in this whole ecosystem (It's impossible to design an ASIC miner if you don't know how bitcoin works under the hood), they of course participate in all kinds of political movements, and this is already a potential danger, so that in the future, government only need to control 5-10 guys to control the whole bitcoin network

How exactly it is a group of dictators?

By that logic, wouldnt that make bitcoin core dev group a group of dictator?

The economic majority (the ppl that give bitcoin economic value) seeks for features they want , and instead they got told what to have by a group of ppl?

 Here we go again with your stupid perspective of industrial miners. If you didnt see this long time ago, it just showed your lack of economy understanding. And such you want a group of ppl (bitcoin core devs) to act as economic experts and control the "economy" by "policies"

The problem here is, that nobody knows, when it will become urgent. You can't predict that, even if some people seem to have crystal balls.
The other problem are people, who think, the system has to break, before we fix it(even thought nobody in his right mind could think, that it won't break)

It seems all the XT bashers have some sort of crystal balls that tell us "blocksize increase is not needed yet and when the next bitcoin adoption wave will be"

Not surprising tho. I've yet to read a single valuable argument from them except "Fear, Uncertainty and Dout"

Do you consider Meni R an "XT basher" now?   ::)

So where does that leave us? I'm not a bitcoin miner, just a user. All I can do is a run a node, but at the end of the day, I'm not technically knowledgeable enough to know what the right solution is, or who to support. And all I can say is that the way that XT was rolled out and politicized leaves a bad taste in my mouth. And that the uncertainty is killing me.

Dictatorship is using power to control others, the power does not limit to physical force or political influence, but more and more appeared as knowledge. This kind of dictatorship is very common in Git hosted open source software projects: Anyone who submit a code change in Git would have to be approved by the code reviewer and core devs, e.g. a group of core devs have the right to decide what should be accepted in bitcoin code and what should not. And when they could not reach agreement, there will be a fork

Since bitcoin now have so much influence, there are many people who want to push in some code that is of their interest and reach millions of users around the world by an update of bitcoin protocol. Thus you see Mike wants to push in some code that is useful for Lighthouse project, while Peter wants to push in some code for Lightning network, and someone else might wait in some lines to get bitcoin work with Etherium, and so on... Who should decide what should be included and what should not be? It is better no one should be allow to change the protocol unless in a clear and real crisis that is understandable for everyone. This is similar to that no one should be allowed to change IP protocol while everyone can freely built their own application upon it

Good question! I believe that it is very difficult to decide even if you have enough knowledge (The more you know the more question you have). In fact I constantly change sides if I consider it from a different view: Maybe Gavin is right in using some force to brake the current deadlock status?

But eventually I prefer the least risky approach when facing uncertainty. Maybe those guys sitting at the top can see far beyond what I can see, but I can not blindly trust anybody, but only take the most conservative approach

It is a vote.  Gavin just called for an election.  People need to stop freaking out.  It isn't over throwing the ways or a revolution.  Right now XT has about 10% of the node votes and 0% of miner votes.  http://xtnodes.com/index.php (http://xtnodes.com/index.php)

But per the whole vote thing, really, it is kind of silly and bitcoin is broken.  There are only 20 people in all of bitcoin that matter.  Those are the 20 admins of the 20 biggest pools.  Together they control more than 95% of the bitcoin hash.  And technically Gavin only needs 75% of the vote, which is actually only the top 6 guys he needs to convince.  https://blockchain.info/pools (http:// https://blockchain.info/pools)

It is a vote and it is an election, but really only among 20 delegates that are being supported by their constituencies of miners.  

The Admins of the pools are irrelevant.  It's the people with mining hardware who matter and the people who will buy their bitcoins from them so they can pay their electricity bills.  It takes a miner a few minutes to switch pools.

FTFY.

https://i.imgur.com/SMST7G4.png

he did, but everyone is calling it a fake.
https://i.imgur.com/IJ6p9Pb.png

Thats true for one good reason, there is no good soution, both have advantages and disadvantages. I want Bitcoin to become global payment network so it must be increased from 1 MB to 8MB minimum.

I would call it a divorce, since the winner are not able to prevent the other chain from grow, while in an election, the loser must follow the lead of winner

At first, the winner vs loser would look like bitcoin vs litecoin, however, since both chains have same algorithm, miners are free to switch between these two different chains: When A chain is not profitable, they will go to B chain, thus make B chain stronger, thus B chain regain popularity if someone is pumping up the price of B chain. This kind of situation will drag along for many years to come

Vote is not a way to solve the problem in a decentralized system

I agree with you,no collaboration between main devs,and lack of informations,no basic transparency
I fSatoshi will appear,peoplewill not believe it is real Satoshi

Will anybody lesson him after years

What is he thinking about bitcoin now
will be great to hear

One would assume he has his keys to his coins and can sign them or move them to prove it is him.

You still have your first toys? I'd say that he lost most of his private keys too.

maybe so.  it was just an experiment back then and they were worth nothing.  then again...... he was Satoshi. 

I think you are right. When Satoshi would speak up then his word would be a law. No one would speak against without surviving it because bitcoiners love satoshi till death.

Though i think this is the biggest real crisis for the community and the development of bitcoin. Before crisis were only scams or drop of price. That is nothing with the technology. But now satoshi really could start to say a word in order to safe bitcoin. It's his child at the end.

I think he still takes part in the community. Maybe we wrote with him already without knowing it. I really don't think he is not here anymore.

:D Satoshi can't die. And even if he dies he will resurrect. There are enough bitcoiners that see him as some form of holy being or god at all. Maybe it's a joke but he is a mysterious figure that no one can see, he only lives in stories from the past. I wonder if there will be a sect like "Fraternity of Satoshi" or so at one point. :D

I'm sorry but this ideology is why Satoshi is never coming back and an example of how dangerous for Bitcoin it would be.

This is not your religion.

There is no Satoshi.

There is no God.

I think there will never be a consensus since the other part of the core developers seems to be involved in blockstream and the lightning network. The thing is, when bitcoins gets unreliable, expensive and slow, then that sidechain will get more transactions, which translates to more fees.

The developers already would have said they will 8 MB blocks if they would want them. Though they, for the most part, don't want to. There is no reason to believe they will change their view anytime soon.

Before you misunderstand my other post... it was ironically. I don't see him as a god. But i think if he came out and would say his opinion that his word really would be some kind of law. Because he is the one who brought bitcoin to life. And i really think that there would be not much resistance against what he claims to be right. He is simply so very much trusted.

Only his words would be listened to and considered. You've seemingly totally missed the point of the whole anonymous act.

Dictator? You realize that it is more like a democracy? Gavin and Hearn can't take away bitcoin. Every user of bitcoin votes what he wants to use. Core or XT. That sounds more like a democracy to me than a dictatorship.

And even when XT would win, for some reason, then 99% of the users would switch back to core when core implements bigger blocks. Because the ideas hearn has are simply too dangerous.

It's democracy...

Yes, his words. I don't await him coming out publicly showing his face.

But i think you made a good point why he won't say anything. He most probably knows that every agency in the world is interested in his identity. Him speaking now would be way too risky. The NSA or so could find out who he is pretty easy probably. And i'm sure he will avoid that at all costs. Since he doesn't trust banks and probably not the governments too.