Bitcoin Forum

So is this really the path we are going to take? Bitcoin is being constantly developed by the developers. They hold the development sceptre in their hands and push everything down the throat of a bitcoin user, with the consensus of the miners (who on most part look only for their own interests).

Yes bitcoin is unfortunately becoming centrally planned, communist, and identical to a central bank fiat currency system. Even if bitcoin is not a fiat money, because the develpment holds the power to steer bitcoin in the wrong way, we should be careful how much power we give to the developers. We have now 5 year plans and 10 year plans for bitcoin? That's like soviet central planning isnt it.


It's easy to abuse power, bitcoiners should know that more than anybody, yet we give full power to developers?

Consensus or not, I feel they hold too much power , and bitcoin could be steered towards a dark path.


How much more development does bitcoin really need? When it will be over? Or it will be forever developed and the developers will become the Gods of bitcoin?

If this hole isnt closed then it will have big blowbacks later because anybody can just manipulate and corrupt the developers.

Next step: Governments will take over or "regulate" the development process of bitcoin, and game over. Bitcoin is gone as an independent currency.

Communism isn't centrally planned. Communism is everyone sharing and reaching consensus without a leader. I believe what you are thinking is socialism, which leads to dictatorships.

But that's not the point. Development allows improvements to the software. It fixes bugs and adds new features that people want. Without development you are basically hoping that no one at any point in time will want any other features and that there will be no vulnerabilities in the code for people to exploit. It is predicting the future, and that is impossible. We need further development to improve Bitcoin.

Another thing is the open source. While yes the developers have power because they can change the code that people use, the open source nature means that not everyone has to use what the developers want you to use. You can at any point fork the code and modify and write your own client. It doesn't have to conform to the rules that the developers have set, you can set your own. If people don't like where Bitcoin is going, they can switch to use another client, or just use another altcoin.

anyone can join github and be part of it. its not a closed 'mens club'
anyone can make a copy of the github and make their own collective,
anyone can choose not to update anything they dont like
anyone can downgrade if they find new versions have issues

what i find more surprising is that you are a NXT fanboy. which is more centralised..

If you don't like what you see then run nodes of the fork you like and convince others to do so. Personally I think the current team is better than the "Benevolent dictator" Gavincoin fork but each to its own man, just run whatever node you want.
Lets not forget anyone can propose code in github as well.

Well communism had it's fair share of dictators too didnt it? Central planning is a tenet of communism & socialism.







I understand that, and I support that.

But we still need to find the balance, just simply giving all power to them can lead to corruption, and it will lead to it guaranteed.

We cannot base the bitcoin project on a perpetual deity system, where a few chosen ones will just steer bitcoin to wherever they want.




I`m not questioning the immediate code of bitcoin.

I`m questioning the future direction of bitcoin, and the path it will take in the future. Just the current bitcoin debate makes me very unconfortable, and indifferent of the outcome, the mere fact that we give so much power to people who will despotically decide over BTC is not correct,

Why dont we stop developing medicine for example, or industry, or anything? Dude, everything evolves and is under constant development. If not we would still be in stone age.

No its not. Please do your research about the differences between communism and socialism. There is no central planning in communism. In communism people agree to share equally and adhere to those ideas. In socialism, there is a central authority who is forcing everyone under their command to adhere to communistic ideas, whether they want to or not. There is a huge difference between the two.

Balance between what? Developers don't have the "ultimate power". They can only publish something, its up to the users whether they want to use it or not. No one is forcing the users to use certain code, it is all up to the users to decide.

What exactly are you concerned about? They also do not and cannot despotically decide over what happens to Bitcoin. Again, it is up to the users to decide whether to use their code or not.

If you don't like the developers, then what do you propose we do? How are you going to restrict their power without giving someone else power? I think the current system is fine. There are many many developers, not just the core developers, who contribute to discussions and code. Even if one person wants to go in one direction, there may be opposition. In fact there often is opposition to proposed ideas, from both the community and other developers. Yet they always reach consensus before merging something in through various compromises. No one developer holds absolute power, and there will most definitely not be a collusion of developers to force Bitcoin in one direction. There are simply too many people with too many differing opinions for that to happen.

What if it does? We switch to a new client and problem solved. Do you really think that miners, exchanges, other services, users, etc. would risk so much money and stay with malicious developers/etc. ? If so, think twice.

This statement is very ignorant and I am pretty sure that you're not a tech savy user or developer/engineer. If we quit development right now, Bitcoin would most likely die within the next few years. A example is ECDSA and quantum computers; we can't know what is going to happen and when new security flaws might appear. Bitcoin has so much potential and there have been huge improvements compared to the original client.

Democracy may not be good for bitcoin, we are reaching critical point of block chain size. There is still no agreement.

If you disagree with current developments/development methods you can release a fork of your own, call it a final version, release it and request adoption of your client.

Bitcoin cannot be static. Just like the banking system developed, Bitcoin must have its own developments for it to succeed and to adapt to an everchanging society. There is no good in having software and services stuck in time. It's just like latin language: it's not spoken or developed upon, and it's slowly dying.

That is not a correct comparison. Gold and the concept of Bitcoin being an item are there. However what we are improving is the method of transacting and transferring Bitcoin. The same thing happened with gold. Gold itself never changed, the same with Bitcoin (if you abstract the technicalities of Bitcoin to be actual coins). The methods of moving gold around have changed. It used to be lug around a ton of gold and hand it to someone else in a transaction. It became give your gold to someone else who gives you paper which represents that gold. Without those constant improvements to the way gold was transacted, we would still be lugging around chunks of gold, hacking off a bit, weighing it, and then handing it over in a trade. That transaction method is still in general the basic method of transacting, and is the basis of higher level easier transacting of gold.

The same thing is happening with Bitcoin. There are improvements being made into how it is being transacted. Currently we use send to addresses. Improvements were made for payment requests, multisig transactions. Improvements are being made for locking outputs so that they can only be spent at a later date. There is work done to reduce the amount of data you need to store. There are improvements being made in the ways that we are transacting Bitcoin just like there were improvements in transacting gold.

THAT IS NOT COMMUNISM. YOU CLEARLY HAVE NO IDEA WHAT COMMUNISM IS!!! DO YOUR RESEARCH INTO WHAT COMMUNISM ACTUALLY IS!!!

That is simply planning, and it may be centralized. BUT IT ISN"T COMMUNISM!!

You can also draw the comparison for planning things in advance into everything. Are you telling me that you live your life without planning a few years in advance? If you do, by your logic, you are a communist! Also, everything has future plans. Huge tech companies like Google and Apple plan things several years in advance.

It isn't communism, it is simply good organization and actually knowing what the hell you are doing. IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH COMMUNISM!!!!!!!!!

They do. But they can also be replaced. If people don't like the government, they revolt and replace the government with another. Likewise, if people don't like what the developers are doing, they can simply move on and go to a new fork which has different developers.


Again, open source and the freedom to choose what you want to run protects against that. People don't like where Bitcoin is going, they switch to use another fork.

gold is natural. its not created in a lab. but... here is the rub. gold is buggy (impure) it requires refining.. so your analogy is to stop refining/purifying gold.

secondly do you know when the bugs will be fixed. i mean.. even when microsoft releases a new version of windows that they believe is the most bug free version. ready for mass release.. within weeks new UNFORSEEN bugs become realised. and new patches are created, even XP which was released years ago is still not bug free.. but instead of keep developing it, microsoft decided to ditch it.

if bug fixes stop happening, people end up ditching it.

lastly.. you say "that doesnt mean they should not monitor it" . "they" who?? and if "they" do see a bug, will "they" be allowed by you to provide a fix. or will "they" just moan on a forum and hope someone else provide a fix. and this someone else will you then say that this someone else is the new 'god'.

when you realise that there are over 100 people always looking into bitcoin, all from different countries, all with different backgrounds and skills you should be happy that they continue to bug fix and test constantly.. rather then just waiting for things to screw up and hoping a random person who has not been scrutinized by his peers who's fix has not been pre-tested by over 100 people before its even released to the masses.

bug fixes should always happen.. i think what you should be arguing is not bugs.. but hard forks caused purely for 'features' which such occurrences should be reduced or no longer required.

EG. SegWit.. all of the features of datasize drop can be done in client-side coding without affecting the main protocol. bitcoins protocol does not need to fork the main chain just for litewallet clients to benefit from a drop in databloat(pruning signatures).

True, in theory it is so, but in practice it is more complex.

1. Not everyone possess the skills and time to work on github, and most importantly not everyone have commit access, that is the point of centralized control. Even for core devs it is difficult and time consuming to understand the meaning of a complex scheme promoted by their colleagues

2. You can fork to another set of code easily, but you can't fork the whole ecosystem, e.g. community, investors, miners, exchanges, etc... Not everyone have the same weight in this ecosystem, miners and exchanges almost decided which version is "currently official". And the investor who has the most coins can decide which chain can survive economically if there is a fork (trying to fork your own coin and establish your own exchange? The moment your exchange is up and running, you will face millions of coins dumped from pre-fork coin holder)

I think it is very important to keep the communication open and transparent, that is not easy due to the knowledge gap between different actors' expertise in their specific area

At least all the decisions must be backed by concrete data from research and statistics, not imagination or wishful thinking. I suppose that most of the community members are sane and literate  :D

But it is also the way that pretty much every single open source project out there works. You don't need commit access to the main project if you can just fork it off. The not having commit access is good because it prevents people from inserting malicious code and just screwing with the whole thing.

That is true. Miners carry a lot of weight, but I think the exchanges carry more. Miners aren't going to mine on a fork if they can't exchange it. The same kind of goes with business that accept Bitcoin. They aren't going to use a fork if no one uses it and likewise miners and users won't use a fork if no one accepts it. It is kind of a big convoluted circle, but I don't think the developers have that much weight. They can't really force people to do anything, but businesses and exchanges can because the economy relies on them, and that is what is important.

Communication is open and transparent, at least among the developers. All of their discussion is in the mailing list, irc, or on github. And all of it is logged so people can go back and see what has been said. Of course technical jargon and acronyms are often used so it can be hard for nondevelopers to understand.

A normal open source project is different than bitcoin, since bitcoin is money. Because of billions of dollar of value involved here, this central point of control will attract careerist/capitalist like rotten fish to flies. How can you make sure they are incorruptible, given average developer are not super rich elites in today's society

Exactly. Unfortunately exchanges and businesses usually do not process enough IT expertise at code level, so they are the target of lobbying. You can see that a large exchange coinbase joined XT club, means they don't really understand what that means (If XT forked without super majority, they will face millions of coins sell from the core chain)


That's the problem here, to communicate with businesses and exchanges, developers should describe their idea clearly in understandable form, or with good examples, however they usually have different aspect than business people, so the communication is almost impossible. When you have a communication difficulty or a conflict of interest, then you end up in a political way, to rely on the one you trust, and this will make some politically weak devs to be compromised

The Satoshi's dream is Over!! RealBitcoin is right, bitcoin now is centralized in few miners and few greater wallet online (coinbase, blockchain wallet, ...)

Bitcoin  is centralized now

Well I would not go so far as to say Communist but those with the most bitcoins win.

ok realbitcoin is stoned and having paranoia moment today..

lets give him a few days to sober up and let him reflect on his thoughts.

with mining in china, iceland, canada, uk, and europe.. i dont see mining as centralised.
as for the paranoia about government.. they dont need to control the code. as the code will be limiting to them.  because if we see dodgy code we wont download. its just that simple.

all they have to do is tax bitcoin direct.. within the year they would own atleast 90% of coins. so relax about the code.

as for the services. if they want to use dodgy code.. let them.. we just wont deposit with them.. they will soon change their mind..

so realbitcoin. go back to your centralised NXT website. and by the way.. communism which is community sharing is what bitcoin is.. what you describe is capitalism

No, you have the wrong philosophy. Everything needs development and improvement. Without improving medicine, the average lifespan would not be in the 70s and 80s; we would not have eradicated diseases like smallpox; diseases that we don't consider life threatening would kill you. In industry, improvements increase output, efficiency, quality among others. Without improvements to our technology, you wouldn't even be here on the internet discussing on an internet forum about a new technology called Bitcoin. If everything simply stopped at the first iteration like you are suggesting, then we would still be using rocks and living in caves. Improvements and development of things are required to advance anything.

It is resilient. Bitcoin right now can survive a lot of things, including forks. But there can be improvements made. If development were to stop, bitcoin would still work, but it would not be its best.

How exactly is it a command and control vehicle for manipulation in the future?

Again, open source. If we don't like what the developers do, then we just fork and use a client created by other developers. Even if one country regulates Bitcoin, that doesn't mean that all countries will. Developers in other countries can simply step in and replace those that were removed due to regulation.

Yea like the 10000s of cancer cures? Howe about prevention instead of those scam medicines. How about dont drink fluorided water and breath chemtrailed air.



The code is resilient, the humans arent.

It's easier to manipulate bitcoin users towards a dark agenda, than to mess with the code.



And who is we? Most bitcoin users dont really care or are ignorant about this. It is becoming centralized either way, if it's not decentralized by design, with no "updates"

Realbitcoin.. please go to sleep and have a sober conversation tomorrow. you losing your own argument the more you talk tonight

I believe it is better to have one good leader than bunch of people pulling strings in different directions. Democracy is not the best option here.
But from the other side dictatorship of developers are not the best option either. Recent discussion about XT and block size limit shows that we have to invent some way to steering bitcoin.
Maybe global voting platform build in bitcoin wallets?

I agree that you need to keep the development going.  Whether or not the development keeps running, the government can try to step in any time they want to take control, so there is no difference whether or not the development keeps moving forward.  We need further development in the times coming because people will want different options and if the development should ever stop, then someone else will improve on the system and the system will soon be extinct. 

RealBitcoin is rigth!

Franky1 say: "ith mining in china, iceland, canada, uk, and europe.. i dont see mining as centralised."

See: https://blockchain.info/pt/pools
F2Pool 25%
AntPool 22%
BitFury 15%
together 62% power mine > 51%...

i see mining as centralised and Wallet too.

I don't remember where I read gavin andresen say that small full nodes are nothing in terms of consensus against greater wallet online, he said that power was the big investors (big $user$ bitcoin), but besides these were the big miners and big wallet have force.

We seize the new more professional stage. Probably a sort of BC will be developed. bitcoin will remain strong, but centralized.

human should like powers centralized. Most major bitcoin depositors just want anonymity, they don't care centralization.

I hate it, but so is do.

I execute a full node... Still

Wake up !!

Yes that is too. But development is a problem too.

We can easily guess that now POS currencies are superior to BTC, they are ecofriendly and cannot get victim to a 51% attack, and if their prices would be higher than it would be even more secure than POW.

POW at the moment is more secure, but if this persists, it will lose it's appeal in the future.

your name says it all..

combining 3 different companies with operations in atleast 5 different countries, with investors from atleast 12 different countries.. does not make them a combined force.. thats just opinion. your opinion, no one elses

do you realise that it is as easy as 3 lines of code to say that if block solved by 1 entity more than less than 4 blocks ago, we can ignore that block and accept whoever solved second instead.. that way it prevents 4 miners from solving blocks repeatedly,

do you realise that it is as easy as not upgrading software to vote against change.
do you realise that it is as easy as saying no to drugs for you to start having rational thoughts within a week..

Realbitcoin should try the last one..

Would you rather that there be absolutely no chance for a cure for cancer? The fact that we have researchers looking for cures means that the odds of finding one are greater than 0, and that is much better than guaranteeing that there is no cure.

Prevention you say, well vaccines prevent illnesses. But without advances in medicine we wouldn't have vaccines. Without further advances there wouldn't be vaccines for new diseases, and we wouldn't be able to improve the current ones to work better.


While true, it is just as easy to manipulate users away from a dark agenda. It is easy to manipulate people to revolt, as we have seen historically in a number of large revolutions.

We is the users of Bitcoin. There are many users of Bitcoin who, like me, actually give a shit and research things. If we (technologically savvy and actually caring about the code and technical details) are aware of changes being made that could be disastrous, we would let everyone know. And most people who use Bitcoin now are not ignorant and many people do care. It will be the people who join later if/when bitcoin goes mainstream that don't care and are ignorant.

KKKKKK

pensei que a brincadeira iria passar em branco... (Did not understand?)

Now , three miners = 62 % , in few year, how many hash Percentage of the F2Pool ? >51???? I don't now.

Unless for some miracle everyone becomes a pro programer with lots of free time,  I think would be impossible the situation be much better.

We need reliable people to make the common user know when the things are really getting bad

If they do get close to 50% of the hash power, miners will move away from mining on F2Pool. Miners understand that if they give a pool too much hash power they could potentially do terrible things to the network. And there is a precendence for this. A few years ago GHash.io was a huge mining pool, and it actually did reach more than 50% of the hash power. However once miners noticed, they moved away from using ghash.io and went to other pools. All of the miners who mined on that pool no longer did and thus they lost hash power. The same will happen if f2pool or any other pool gets close to or obtains the majority of the hash power.

Nobody read gavin say "who really rules the Bitcoin"? I only reader?

Only Those Who invested a lot of money is what important, others can scream have been ignored. I was sad, but  It's always been like that and this will always be so.

Right, only those who actively use Bitcoin and don't just hodl. They are the people who actively participate in the economy and they are the ones that can exert influence. It has always been like this and always will be, as that is how every economy works.

Everything depends on the users, those actually spending. Businesses will accept what people are using, exchanges will accept what people are using, and so will miners because then they can use what they are mining.

Those who have a lot of Bitcoin and just hodl don't have any control. They can't do anything because they aren't actually participating in the economy, so they have little influence.

Although developers and miners hold power (which I feel it is deserved due to their work for Bitcoin) users still can dislike what they do running away from Bitcoin, or showing their conformity by holding on to Bitcoin. I do not see reason for worries.

If Bitcoin becomes too controlled there are thousands of alts too... I know they are not worth much right now, but that is because users (not developers) chosed Bitcoin, and can chose other if they think Bitcoin is not providing what they want.

Do you think They are caring against centralization? Or they only think of profits

I really want that not going on the move to centralization.

Who are "They"?

Are you saying that you don't actively participate in the economy (by buying and selling stuff) so that means that you can care about centralization but those who participate don't? That is flawed logic. I participate in the economy, and I care about this. Other people also participate, and they clearly care about centralization and where Bitcoin is going. And it does also affect their profits. If Bitcoin goes in a direction that is bad for Bitcoin, then they are going to lose profits. So yes, they will care if it goes in a direction that makes them lose profits.

Of course, but what big players want to bitcoin, will be the same we want?

The hash power began to rise exponentially again.
Why, if before was almost linear.

https://blockchain.info/pt/charts/hash-rate?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=

Why this new trend of super rise?

This is off topic, but to answer your question, it is due to the recent release of new ASIC hardware. More efficient ASIC mining hardware has made mining a little cheaper so more people are mining. They also have higher hashrates so people are replacing their equipment and getting more hash power. If you are insinuating that there is some conspiracy to increase the hash power and do something malicious, you are wrong.

Who is going to be these reliable people? And what if they have a conflict of interest? Trust and hope should never be in the decision making of bitcoin, research and understanding is the way to go

I think there is a safe way: You simply ignore all the upgrade unless you fully understand those BIP proposal. I know today lots of people upgrade without understanding BIPs in new version, so there is a need for user friendly presentation to translate each BIP into language that everyone can understand thus make their own decision

This is not how economy works, economy is all about power, politics and illusions

Those who have lots of bitcoin and just hodl have the biggest influence to this ecosystem. Because if bitcoin have no value, then it is no use for anybody. And large capitals can greatly affect its value, both on exchanges and mining infrastructure

Remember Satoshi's 1 million coins? I think those coins functions as a nuclear weapon against a malicious fork by a group of people, if that fork gains momentum and is not in the vision of Satoshi, he will dump all those coins on that fork's exchange and send its value to 0, thus kill it. Of course nothing preventing people from using that fork and slowly build up its value again after the crash. But capital will only chase the coin with the highest market capital (this is also why Ethereum will never get close to bitcoin's market cap)

It is the capital maintain bitcoin's value and its infrastructure, not the end user, and they own mining farms and exchanges, basically have control over where bitcoin is going

Being user oriented is a wrong mindset, because money is all about power, how to manage power is totally another area of study

You can imagine, large capitals are more concerned about the security and integrity of the system instead of transaction fee, because they can afford very high transaction fee, that's why BIP 101 did not receive enough support

It is not predicting the future. It is being awfully wrong. Because the future is actually very predictable in some case like this one: of course if you leave the code as it is now without updating it, someone will hack it.
If an apple is released from a tree, it will fall to the ground.
I don't know your sources but here are mine, that's to say, about any dictionary or article that would pop up amidst the first results when you type "communism" in google:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/communism
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Communism.html
http://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/communism
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/communism

Now can I see your sources? Because I really feel like what you're talking about is actually a kind of self regulated anarchy. Which is in fact quite opposite to communism (and extremely idealistic but that's another matter).

Now let me quote something for thruth so that I remain on topic:
I totally agree with this. There are of course people who hold more power than others, but no one has any despotic kind of power, and that won't happen because customers also have their word.
And it's not because bitcoin is "planned" that it necessarily is communist. Bitcoin's economical system is even actually fairly liberal (bwahaha fairly liberal :D). Not even remotely socialist in any way. Needless to talk about it being communist. That's a nonsense.

There cannot be a cure for cancer because cancer is not an ilness, it's a mutation. And it can appear anywhere.

Looking for a magic elixir to cure all diseases is more like a scam and taxpayer money is easily funneled to fund these con artist researchers.


To combat cancer, you just need to eat healthy and boost your immune system.


Use the same philosophy in bitcoin. There will be thousands of malware targeting it and exploiting it, it should have been designed to be immune to that, just like linux vs windows. Bitcoin should not be developed constantly.




Except that evil always has more resources than good people. Just look the elite vs the common people. The elite alone have more wealth than the rest of the humans combined.


I hope you are right there :)

I think that there is a little more than needed imagination here. As for me developers are an irreplaceable piece of bitcoin. If even only one developer will have something to ad to bitcoin there will be need for him and he must be respected not as a God but as an important person who is doing something very important: is doing bitcoin a better product.

As for the centralization of bitcoin no one and nothing cannot realize it even will have desire. No one can control bitcoin. Whatever can do. Even the owners of pools that have much more power and possibility to realize such "wonder" cannot do this. For the simple reason that in the moment that all those who are in market agree to make common policies (mean centralized policies) like the 5 years plans (the 10 ones I haven't proved because in my country existed only the 5 years ones before the '90) of Soviet Union to manage bitcoin, there can be created tens of other pools owners that will make again their policies and not those of the first group. So no centralization.

As for the power of developers I don't think that cannot become any risk from them. It is out of mind that 5 or 10 or 15 people work to own bitcoin. Is out of mind this thing. About 15 million of bitcoin are already produced and are out of their hands. So remain to be produced only 6 million. And all those during more than 100 years. Even they will have the possibility to live other 100 years and own it, this amount is not enough to make them controller of bitcoin. Is less than 50% of the amount in circulation. To control bitcoin mean to be able to control its amount in circulation, its price at the market and first of all to be able to produce it as you want. All the previous are totally impossible to be realized by not 5 or 10 or 15 people but by no one.

The fear of OP seems not justifiable.  :D

could not agree more!

There's Reds under the Bed!

How daft do you lot look to people from outside of the influence of the Wall St cabal of central banks and intolerance to all that is not theirs to dictate to?

Central plans are such bold and forward looking statements as were made when one man stood in front of a microphone and said "Before this decade is over, we shall send a man to the moon, and return him safely to earth.  We do this not because it is easy, but because it is hard" ... perhaps someone with better access to history could paste the exact wording.  My point is that having a central plan is not necessarily a bad thing, and in my view is necessary to set and acheive the highest possible standards in all that we do.

Following a central-bank plan of "lets flog penny stocks to the muggles and divert the proceeds to the poor retired banker extra pocket money fund" would be horrid, and it is that, not Reds under The Bed scares which I suggest we be most vehemently opposed to.

I disagree with this statement. It is very clear the develoeprs do not have a sceptre in their hands, from the recent blocksize debate. Also do not forget the developers cannot push changes as they want, if the miners do not agree no change is made. Bitcoin is decentralized and without consensus they are powerless.

Linux and Windows are constantly being developed, otherwise we would still be using MS-DOS. Look at the linux kernel git: https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/. There are commits happening very frequently, and some even happened today. Windows is also constantly developed. They release windows updates every tuesday of each month. They release Service Packs and new Windows versions. Are you calling that "not constantly developed"? More people rely on Windows and linux every day than do people who use Bitcoin. They have more at stake, and they still constantly develop.

centralised means ONE point of failure.

so here is the challenge..

find me the SINGLE node that can make bitcoin fail.

do this and you can win the argument.

remember:
if one miner gets nefarious, there are a dozen others that can ignore that fork
if there is one exchange that gets nefarious there are a dozen others that people can use
if there is one bitcoin-core update that gets nefarious there are a dozen versions that people can choose.

so think real hard. and find that single point of failure.

goodluck..

P.S if you cannot, then please accept that bitcoin is distributed, not centralized.. and requires many points to collude to cause potential failures.
and that the argument is that bitcoin slowing reducing its distribution independence thus collusion is slightly more theoretically possible

But the mere conflict that debate creates, is one form of sabotage.

As you can alredy see the blocksize debate is already causing FUD and hurting the price, and has a possibility of forking the community.

Classic Divide & Conquer.

so you dont want central control. and now you dont want division.. maybe just maybe you will never be satisfied

What? No, you put words in my mouth.

Centralization is creating D&C, I want a united bitcoin community in spirit, but a decentralized methodology with infinite nodes so that the risk of network collapse is infinitessimally small.

I want bitcoiners to be united in spirit in the sense that we should not fight amongst eachother, and respect eachothers points of views, but to not create divisions in these issues unless its absolutely necessary.


If the debate heats up a division will be inevitable, just like bacteria are dividing and then fight amongst eachother. A split & competition method can be only the last resort, after all we would all lose half of our money that way, and it's not in our best interest to do so, regardless of who is wrong ( 1mb vs big blocks)

Misunderstood my point, i`m not really talking about technical sabotage.

My concerns are about influence manipulation and sabotaging people in bitcoin (not the network).

The development wave can certainly create trends, and if that trend is a dark trend, people will either resist it or go along with it: if they resist, they create division, if they go along then its bad too.

So it's bad in all cases.

saying you dont want devision then saying it would be inevitable
saying you want everyone united, then saying you want subversion

still contradicting yourself
oh and by the way.. bitcoins are more secured by private keys, not blocksizes or client versions.. you wont lose coins if one client goes in one direction or another.. the coins are still locked to the privkey and you can choose to spend them on whichever fork works best.

You read every 5th word I say? Read again because you dont seem to read it all and put words in my mouth.

No, I dont want division, and if its going to be inevitable, then and only then should division happen.

I want people united in spirit, but they should still have their ideas which should compete with eachother, but only in the context that people still remain loyal to the project.

I dont want subversion at all, where did you get this?

I dont lose coins, but I sure damn lose the value of the coins, if sabotage, subversion and manipulations start to happen.

so if we kept loyal to the bitcoin project we would all trust gavin andressen still.. and would remain united and loyal to anything he proposes as he is the project manager.
but wait your happy people didnt remain loyal and united. your happy that subversion happened and he moved off to do it as a separate xt project.

all in all.. trying to say lets all unite and think of bitcoin as a single project is the opposite to reality.. bitcoin has several different implementations. mining pools dont even run the proper bitcoin-core. they have their own code. exchanges and services use their own programs too.

bitcoin is already distributed more than i think you realise, and people are all having different idea's and each of them dont want bitcoin to fail because it affects their own holdings.

compared to 2009-20010 when there was just 1 program, 1 exchange, one team of developers.. bitcoin is much much much better now.
i just dont think you see the bigger picture of the whole ecosystem. i do see your comments seem a bit more lucid than yesterday, but i think you need ust another day yo sit quietly and think about things to see the whole picture.

this may help
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/img/articles/bitcoin-is-growing-up-an-infographic-of-the-bitcoin-ecosystem-1.jpg

i think your putting too much imaginary paranoia into your thoughts and not seeing how spread out bitcoin is.

How many bitcoin players are Required To have consensus? 3 miners, 4 exchange (or wallet) and 5 programmers? If 1,000 of us , running full node , complain , we will be heard?

Case the group of 12 (3 miner, 4 exhange and 5 developer) had accepted the XT , the thousands of claims against would have been heard?

Yes they would have been heard. The thousands of miners who mine at those 3 pools who are against XT (or any other proposed fork) switch to other pools who does not support the fork. Those 3 pools no longer have a majority.

The thousands of users (including the miners) who don't support the fork stop using those 4 exchanges and use other less popular but just as good exchanges.

The thousands of users who use those 5 developer's client switch to another client.

With all of the options out there, people aren't being forced to use anything, and if they don't like it, then they don't have to use those products or services which use rules they don't like. This is consensus.

I want to Be Wrong, I want to be Convinced Of this, but I fear What are YOU IN too delighted with the Bitcoin to See THIS centralization is Forming.

Why do you say I am delighted? Stop putting words in my mouth. I see that there is centralization, there inherently is. There absolutely is no way to have complete and absolute decentralization. But it isn't on the scale or level which you claim it is.

When I spoke of exponential increase in rate hash, i don't  suspect of attack , but that has  big betting in Bitcoin.
I didn't believe in Increase hash rate now, because we are Close to see the reduced Reward to 12.5 BTC.

I think I'm calmer now

Okay, you're right. However , it was exactly what I wanted , the total decentralization.
I believe I'll have to accept friendly centralization.

Thank you again for your patience

Alright then, your argument about division is not valid because again I`m not saying blindly follow anybody, I said 3 times that only united in spirit, but each with it's own ideas to compete, so the problem with gavin and the solution to it was necessary to happen, yes many people saw it through.

I like the picture of the services, yes it gives me hope about bitcoins future , thanks :)

I'm afraid that thousands of users do not have this degree of freedom. What you said is true at the early stage of bitcoin when bitcoin was still in design phase and worth only a little. At this stage, everyone have invested so much money, effort and time into this ecosystem, thus their economy interest will limit their choice

Imagine that majority of exchanges have upgraded to XT and one exchange left running core, and a fork happened. Then core exchange will immediately be flooded by millions of pre-fork coins sell order coming from XT coins holder. The value of core coin will crash to 0 right away. And then there is no meaning in mining this coin, all hash power will leave

This means, if any fork happens without reaching major consensus, it is suicide economically. It does not matter how great your view is for the future or how good your design can scale, nothing matters when the market cap of that coin is 0

People have no choice because they don't want to lose money. Only new users won't lose money because of the change to a new fork, all the existing users (especially full nodes) will refuse a fork without major consensus, due to the potential loss it can incur as described above


So, if no major consensus can be reached upon block size limit, bitcoin will stay at its current form until one day a major consensus is forming. This could be that thousands of transactions queuing up in the mempool and many users start to experience significant delay of confirmation. Currently all these negative things are not happening, that's the reason people are not eager to up the limit.

And by keeping the blocksize at 1MB, eventually a fee market will form. And it is interesting to see if this market can solve some of the capacity problem. So instead of trying to avoid such a fee event, seeing how this fee market will develop is more interesting, because no one knows how people will adapt to this kind of new situation

If only the exchanges changed to use XT (or whatever other client that implements a fork), then they would be losing business because few other users are also using XT so they don't make any money. If the users and exchanges were switched to XT and pushing for a for, then the miners would follow because that is where the money is. If miners and exchanges switch but users don't, then those miners and exchanges are incentivised to switch back because there is no money to be made if no one else is using that fork. In all of those cases, it is not possible for one group to coerce everyone else to switch, there has to be two out of three to do so otherwise there is no incentive for the other groups to switch.

Also, in your example, with such a fork, there is nothing that distinguishes a Core transaction from an XT transaction, so those XT holders who are sending core coins to that exchange are also sending their XT coins to that exchange. What you described is simply not possible.

We already know that a fork without consensus is suicidal, it is suicidal for both sides. That is why we always wait for the supermajority before enforcing any sort of fork, hard or soft.

Usually large mining pools have close relationship to exchanges, since they have plenty of liquidity to provide, so I guess they are more or less aligned. Average user however do not really have a choice in where bitcoin is going. So I think the concern of "the group of 12" manipulating bitcoin is real

Users are attracted by bitcoin's several properties:
1. Honest money creation and limited money supply, so its value will always go up long term against fiat money
2. Secure and censorship resistant, a safe medium for storage and transfer of value
3. Fast world wide transaction

When they face a change enforced by miners and exchanges, they have to decide the priority and evaluate what kind of feature they can sacrifice without totally giving up on bitcoin

Statistics showing that majority of people come to bitcoin because of 1 and 2. So any change impacting these property will heavily affect user adoption and drive new users away. 3 are less important. Why no one is too worried about 50% attack? Because 50% attack only affect the payment function of the system, coins in cold storage are not affected. Even chinese government took over all the chinese mining pools, they can't rob other people's coin

Currently there is a trend of advertising bitcoin as a fast and cheap payment method. However, if the new users you gained are just interested in fast and cheap transaction, then you will not have customer loyalty. Once more and more free and instant payment services appear, these customer will easily move away. Besides, this advertisement trend feels like finding innocent new users and dump the coins to them, this is not going to last long  and hurt public image of bitcoin


After the fork the blocks on XT network will not be known to core network, vice versa, just like litecoin network is not aware of any bitcoin transactions since you are running different software

You brought a very interesting point: If XT somehow can destroy the corresponding coin when a pre-fork coin is spent on core chain, then we can eliminate this kind of dangerous attack. But nothing can enforce XT to do this, I guess that is not in the interest of XT, since they might want to destroy the competitor chain to make sure their success

Large miners should lower their hashrates or stop mining for a month so that we can mine easily. Otherwise it's leading towards centralisation. :o

ok, i have spent some time trying to theorize RealBitcoins idea..

the best thing i can come to..

bitcoin is a 'freedom government'

where these nodes are civil servants (american senators, uk MP's) and they are all distributed out in different area's of the lands, all with their own agenda and all supposedly performing a service or being honest for the benefit of the people.

yes they can meet up at the senate(irc://#bitcoin-dev) and discuss new rules, new rights, new ways to tax(fee) how to speed up the justice system.(block validation) but because there is no president/prime minister/overlord. its not centralised. its just organised distribution.

i think RealBitcoin is trying to say that although senators(nodes) live in different states, come from different backgrounds and have different motives for being senators(nodes). there is visible and recorded history that collusion happens in the real world governments. and the same could happen with bitcoin.

though colluding to screw up bitcoin is like the senate saying "lets screw the dollar", or parliament saying "lets screw up the pound" which ultimately would only hurt themselves aswell as others.

Which is exactly what they have done.

Right, so if people are coming for reasons 1 and 2, then they have a vested interest to keep Bitcoin that way. This means that if there are people who are turning Bitcoin onto a path that leads away from those two goals, those who are here for reasons 1 and 2 will be the people who are turning away from those guys and preventing that from happening. So if that group is the majority, then such nefarious schemes to sabotage Bitcoin are not likely to happen.

True, and it is also a major source of people's complaints. Of course what they don't realize is that Bitcoin transactions settle (become non-reversible) much faster than credit card payments.

No, you are incorrect here. Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin XT transactions will be exactly the same, and they will still be connected to each other unless a protocol level change such as changing the magic bytes happens. The only difference is the blockchain the node is using. That means that any transaction that spends pre-fork coins can and probably will be confirmed on both blockchains. And that will continue as long as none of the inputs in the transaction chain becomes tainted with any newly generated coins after the fork (which may be a little hard to do). So if a Bitcoin XT holder decides that he immediately wants to cashout his Core coins, then the transaction he sends to send his core coins to the exchange will also send his XT coins to the same address. That means he won't have access to any of his coins. To actually split it up so that there are actually two sets of coins to be spendable is a lot harder and a lot more hassle to do.

And the easiest way to avoid this is to fork with consensus.

But you just need XT nodes to reject those transactions by blend in some new core coins, and I'm sure you will find a way to do that when you have million dollars worth of coins to dump ;D

I think a consensus is much easier to reach when everyone is experiencing the same problem in reality, not just some imaginary problem claimed by different devs

That is easier said than done. With a fraction of the mining power, blocks would not be produced at the normal rate. They would be mined much slower. And coinbase transactions must have at least 100 confirmations before being spendable, so those trying to dump would need to wait some time before being able to taint their coins with newly generated ones. And most miners seem to not spend their newly mined coins soon after. Looking at the blockchain, most recent coinbase transactions are not being spent.

It is. Is there currently an imaginary problem that is being claimed? The current problem is this block size problem, and it most certainly is not being claimed by only the devs, it is being claimed by everyone else.

Another thing, would you rather wait for a problem to become an actual problem and start screwing with things or would you rather know that a problem that could cause future pains exists and then promptly fix that problem to preempt it? It causes less problems to fix an issue before it becomes a problem than it does to wait for it to become urgent before fixing it. Of course, the problem has to exist first (and be proven to exist), just that it isn't causing a lot of trouble at the current time.

No, what I`m saying is that everyone looks for their own interests, thats just basic human nature.

And if 1 group of people have too much power over others (bitcoin miner vs bitcoin user) then they will impose their will on the others.

Thus even though 90% of bitcoin users want option A, if the miners see option B as more profitable for them, they will enforce option B, and the bitcoin users will just have to follow along like sheep.

You guys are saying as if it were a bad thing.

Yes mining is somewhat centralized, but just wait and see until some day one of those altcoins like XT or Classic win due casuals and shills giving their support and they centralize the nodes too, then that will be actual game over.
But while Core devs are on charge supporting a pro privacy and pro decentralized node (small blocksize) agenda, we are safe. If Gavincoiners gain traction, it's time to sell.

the casuals can fork of to their edgy little altcoin. We are going to set the rules in stone, then put on some segwit and we're done here.

Lots of talks here about communism and centralization..
Everything you know about communism is from TV? History channel?
Bitcoin can be used in every system you can imagine because have nothing in common with it!

I dont understand how bitcoin have problems with centralization?

Your absoltely right.
Let them fork off and finally shut up.I'm getting sick from all this nonsense and attempts to undermine Bitcoin.Because that's the only plan.But it won't work out!

Excuse me but, is there anyone here who has ever lived in a socialist/communist country?? I'm not joking and I don't want to be rude, but let me take your time...

First, some classic quotes:

"Democracy is indispensable to socialism". - Vladmir Lenin

"The goal of socialism is communism". - Vladmir Lenin

"Democracy is the road to socialism". - Karl Marx

"The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism". - Karl Marx


Communism is the ultimate step from a "social democrat" to a socialist political scenario.

When you make everyone "democratic" with social affairs, social benefits, social assistance, when you got tons of parties naming themselves "Social Labour Party", "Democratic Republic Party", "Social Democrat Party", "Christian Social Party", "People Social Party" you're just one step from "Socialist Party", "Republican Socialist Party", "Socialism and Freedom", then you get "United Working Class Party", "People Socialist Party", "National Liberation Movement", "Socialist and United Workers Party", and finally "Communist Party", etc.

In communism, first of all, you have a party and some figures (like Fidel, Maduro, Kim Jong Un, and "past" figures from countries like USSR, China, Cambodia, North Vietnam, Albania, Czechoslovakia, Romania, etc)... they had (have) a godlike representation. This is very visible when you look at religion; this countries don't have the religious freedom. This is why when USSR was dominated by communism, even Buddhism was prohibited. Christianism and Judaism is oposed because it brings the notion of family, to not worship the Emperor or The Leader. The right of private property, the right of inheritance and  all kinds of freedom.

The lack of freedom brings (of course) the extermination of the free market.

All of this brings violence, famine and death. It's a "government" of fear.

Lot of countries are following the steps to communism. They are in America, in Europe, Asia and all around the world.

So, once again, communism is the final path to socialim. It is the socialization of means of production. Communism is a stark form to forcing you to be equal to another people; even if you have money, the communists will take it from you and use in "a common way to share", but everything goes to the party and the heads besides them.

Now...

Bitcoin has nothing to do with it. It's tremendously different. It's very, very, VERY DIFFERENT. Nothing compares to that.

But communism usually means the wealth is spread evenly among the population while capitalism usually involves a closed circle of people controlling the wealth of a nation.

...kid, please, take your books, your pen and pencil back, go study.... you don't even know 0.0000001% of what it is all about.

ok

communism
your leaders tell you the only way to expand the community is to take all the bitcoin, and then hand out more friendlier and faster "liquids", telling you its better for the community
(blockstream 2017-hopefully not)

socialist
you keep half your bitcoin or code knowledge/time and use the other half to help others
(bitcoinQT 2009-2014)

dictatorship
one leader tells you that bitcoins are not useful without their leadership and control. if you want to continue using them you need to follow their rules, which includes higher fee's and silent loyalty even if you do not like their agenda you have no voice or choice in the matter
(blockstream 2016 - hopefully not for long)

democracy
the leaders set up a platform of 100+ people who are schooled in one mindset. and then sent out with a goal for you to become loyal and trust atleast one of them. once earning your trust, they then go back to sit at a table and do their own agenda, telling the community that you have given them the trust to decide for you.
(bitcoin-core 2015-2016)

capitalism
you take other people bitcoins and put them into a company, you then move the funds away secretly and set up another company listing those funds as assets. you then raise more funds through IPO's on this asset rich second company. before declaring bankruptcy on the first company to not need to hand back funds to customers, blaming outside forces you cannot control (mtgox, mintpal, cryptsy)

bureaucracy
team of office workers employs some R&D specialists. they work out a way to become the consultants for bitcoin, they add rules and regulations and a monthly subscription charge for using the service. employing auditors and paper pushers to make it harder for people to apply to the service. years later no one uses it and they employee investigators to look into why it failed
(R3 - hopefully never)

enjoy :D

I think you got your socialism and communism backwards. Socialism is where you have a leader tell you what to do, communism is where you do the social policies on your own volition.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/socialism

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/communism

communism is more authoritarian EG "Mother Russia Owns You". where the government shares out the production/profits while holding all the real assets
socialism is where the community hold the real assets and everyone helps each other

EG if you had some cows..
Socialism everyone owns the cows and get to milk them and share the milk with those in need
communism, the government owns the cows, and only hands out the milk to those they decide needs them


EG a social club is where everyone turns up at a bar and talks freely. the organiser is basically the waitress handing out the drinks that the people ORDER(waitress has no power)

a commune is a gathering of people to talk freely, but the organiser (head of the group) sets rules to keep the people happy, they have power.. and everyone listens and respects what the organiser says
thats why communes which are too authoriatarian are classed as cults.

Maybe leftists and rightists need eachother , even though they are enemies, it's like the ying-yang.


Without rightists, you cannot advance the economy, and cannot create innovation.

Without leftists you cannot create social freedom, and a humane society.


It seems like 2 forces that even though are enemies, they desperately need eachother.

not quite..
the rightists believe in hierachy and power
the leftists believe in social equality.

they (politics) dont need each other.. but outside government benches, the general community(public) with differing minds want and need a balance of left and right representing them, to get a fair view and fair stance between control and social growth

in short the rightists would be happy with total control without competition or debate
in short the leftists would be happy to grow without control being challanged

but the public want a fair balance

I have no interest in politics or history but comparing centralized bitcoin system to communism is not the greatest example ever. Do you agree?

We already got rid of the potential benevolent dictatorship, with the departure of Mike Hearn. The immediate threat have been dealt with. If the development team turns into a <Communist> system, like the OP defined it, we will deal with that too.

The developers work for the community and to improve the technology based on the needs of the community. If they do not address those needs, other developers are free to bring their proposals and the community will decide, if the proposal is good enough to replace the current developers.

There are more than 14,000 subscribers to the BitcoinXT subreddit which is quite significant.

There are still people in bitcoin who would like a totalitarian governance, which is exactly opposite to bitcoin's nature.

When you said is just a general principle. If 75% of miners support the 2MB block size increase, and Core does not support, will you remove the core developers?

In case you didn't get this morning's paper, Bitcoin is now 100% owned and controlled by big business: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1344522.msg13712600#msg13712600

~~

The only hope for the survival of Satoshi's bitcoin is for the community to adopt Gavin's BIP102 variation. That's honestly, the last hope!

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4342u3/bip_block_size_increase_to_2mb_gavinandresenbips/

http://puu.sh/mO2ts/150b0db2e5.jpg (https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4342u3/bip_block_size_increase_to_2mb_gavinandresenbips/)

i've never read so much BS combined. U gotta study a little History first, buddy, before starting to use terms and concepts it's pretty clear you don't have any ideia what mean.

btw, if you know of any planning for the next 5 - 10 years, please share with us. If this planning is official then price can be predicted  ;D

BIP 102 is the reasonable compromise. So the Core should adopt it. Otherwise, bitcoin will live on the Classic chain.

^^Way to villainize whistleblowers >:(

If the core does not adopt it,  the bitcoin will become less useful for large transactions, the price will be zero when litecoin replace bitcoin as the most useful coin.

Except when it becomes centralized and dark forces try to hijack it and control it.

Then it becomes centrally planned, which would be a nightmare.

Core is planning doing 2-4-8 MB increases, but it seems all it takes to block this proposal is Greg Maxwell and luke-jr. Maybe there is another one who has dirty plans to veto the increase and let altcoins enjoing influx of new users. Where we come to when few can veto the rest of community and make money on altcoins at the Bitcoin expense. This compromise model is much worse than 51% democracy model. It remind me how Bitcoiners are treated as utopians from outsiders - the compromise model Bitcoin Core promote seems really as some unreachable utopia clearly out of reality...

I agree with you. As one who spent more than 20 years in the USSR I'd that Communism even worse than you describe it in your text. For example if you become rich they will take all from you and will put you in jail only if you are not connected to the government. If you one way or another are connected to the government then it's okay to be rich.

And yes, Bitcoin has nothing to do with it.

There is a simple solution to that. We can all move to Classic and implement the 2MB increase. Bitcoin will survive again.

I saw a post today on reddit where a CB member said that bitcoin is exactly what I described here.

Of course the hypocrisy is that they are too centrally planned and cannot see that, but that's not the point.

I worry about bitcoin, thats all.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/46ie5h/this_is_what_the_chairman_of_the_federal_reserve/

Centralization is now worrisome.

Japan will make bitcoin a real currency, now what?

The BOJ will start regulate it, or the japanese financial regulators?

They will demand github access to the source code so that they can impement changes in it lol.  :(

How could they? I doubt it. It's just a strategy.

At this point I do not care what is going to happen, I'm more interested in having everyone else do what they intend on changing. The sooner everyone comes to a consensus and everyone begins to start moving in that direction, the happier I will be.

A majority of the issues we have right now with Bitcoin revolve around the lack of political stability, which is expected from a decentralized system, but there should not be so many petty arguments and people should do what is best (which is subjective).

you have it all wrong OP, bitcoin dev use to be "centrally planned".

now we have Core Classic Unlimited, all trying to get miners to agree with them.

development has never been more decentralized.

Bitcoin is the single biggest test on weather people can cooperate or not.

This global test will show if cooperation between large people is possible or not. If not, then obviously democracy is flawed and cannot work, and we will inevitable slip into despotism, no matter how hard we oppose it.

Centralization is a feature of nature, and if the decentralization movement fails, then it becomes inevitable everywhere.

A problem with democracy-by-headcount is that it gives equal votes to everyone, whether or not they can spell.  I prefer democracy-weighted-by-correctness.

Haha very funny.

I prefer democracy weighted by merits, which can be measured by the net worth of a person also known as: Capitalism.

The more money you have the more voting rights, however we must make sure the money comes from a legit way.

That would be a better system.


So in bitcoin, voting by balance is better.

http://bitcoinocracy.com/

Not a chance, as I'm skint.  No debt, but not a lot of money either.
I think you'll find that capitalism gives almost all the permission in the world to idiots who borrow lots and can't or won't pay it back.  They have not shown merit; only reckless audacity.

The debt culture is not capitalism, because its based on keynesian vodoo economics.

In real capitalism everyone would have a credit rating and borrow accordingly.


Printing money and loaning it out is a ponzi economy, and of course it will not be encouraged.


With bitcoin we can do a perfect closed system economy, with a few scams here and there, but not the entire system being a scam to begin with.

Bitcoins would let you transact using an electronic system, more anonymous and quite separate to your bank account.
But still, the rise of a digital currency instead of cold hard cash frightens a lot of people. But it could make sense for governments to dump cash and relay on only Digital currency.

Maybe they will do just that in the future but most likely it will happen in the far future, 20 or 30 years from now. At this point most people unfortunately are not ready to dump cash completely and not only because of the habit of using it, there are a lot of other factors preventing relaying only on digital currency.

Of course people are so materialists that they only like things in their hands.

They cant comprehend a financial system where you hold your money in your head, and it's so alien to them.


You can be a capitalist without being materialist, or atleast that is how I am, i dont really care about physical items, i can totally accept an ethereal economy.

We need more compatible implementations, not ones trying to take over. You can have your desired decentralization like that, however it does not make the developing ecosystem simpler.

The 'forkers' tend to complain about this site, however I think that it represents one of the best voting mechanisms that we currently have (for the users). The signatures can be verified and anyone can vote with any balance (we can differentiate between total balance and total addresses (prone to abuse though)).

I don't see how they could veto the change if everyone else agreed to it.

Bitcoins would let you transact using an electronic system,
But it could make sense for governments to dump cash and relay on only Digital currency.

Communists? In MY BITCOIN?! >:(