darn, for a minute there, i thought you were going to explain the hypocrisy:

He sees Bitcoin as a commodity (world's first digital commodity) rather than a currency, but his company was one of the first to integrate BTC as a payment method. 

http://www.coindesk.com/gyft-co-founder-bitcoin-payments-have-decreased-by-80/

If you can't explain your reasoning, you fail.  Are you afraid I might see a flaw in your logic?

Yes, there must be the rule set which all participants must agree on (that's what consensus means).
It doesn't necessarily imply there must only be one centralized code repository.

Maybe but I don't see why it couldn't change.

The centralization issue you refer to is nothing more than a lack of man power. That is, only a scarce amount of people are reliable and technically able enough to handle the highly fragile development of Bitcoin. It is no wonder the guys currently leading core are some of the world's most advanced experts in their own field. This expertise cannot be easily replaced or dismissed "because decentralization". It is absolutely unproductive and irresponsible to try to advance decentralization of Bitcoin development by encouraging incapable people to start messing around with their own implementations and risk breaking consensus.

What is the basis for that assertion?

As mentioned long ago by Gavin, there can certainly be different implementations of the original reference code.  Even hard forks are possible without a centralized authority as we are witnessing now.

What makes it so special?

Let me make my position clear:

(1) I view the block size limit as an anti-spam measure and I support increasing it.

(2) I believe Bitcoin's greatest point of centralization is presently in development and I support measures to reduce this centralization.

By supporting XT, I help push for both larger block sizes and help move us away from our dependency on Bitcoin Core.  

If another credible team forks Bitcoin Core into a third implementation that also supports larger blocks, I will support that implementation too.  

You absolutely don't understand or are being willingly misleading about this "centralization" issue. There is quite simply no other choice but for us to support a centralized (read unique) consensus code. That's pretty much the only way Bitcoin works. It happens that the core developers have historically been the one trusted with maintaining this code and updating it. Several implementations have been built around this consensus code. Most of them have little support for very valid reason: their implementation is generally considered less tested and therefore potentially less secure than core implementation. Now should we blame core for attracting the most competent developers in the space? Would it be rational to ask of them to each start dividing their work between different implementations just for the sake of "decentralization"?

The centralization issue you refer to is nothing more than a lack of man power. That is, only a scarce amount of people are reliable and technically able enough to handle the highly fragile development of Bitcoin. It is no wonder the guys currently leading core are some of the world's most advanced experts in their own field. This expertise cannot be easily replaced or dismissed "because decentralization". It is absolutely unproductive and irresponsible to try to advance decentralization of Bitcoin development by encouraging incapable people to start messing around with their own implementations and risk breaking consensus.

Now, your objection (ToC) is valid in principle, that it is indeed in each of A, B, C's personal interest to include as much as possible contrary to the larger scarcity goal, but I point out that in this particular scenario, self governing is less likely to fail because (a) cooperation needs to be established only among a small group of actors (i.e. pool operators) that directly control the majority behavior, and are able to directly communicate with each other (as opposed to a large, amorphous population that usually underlies ToC type scenarios), and (b) because defection is publicly visible.

If, say, the two or three largest pools really want scarcity, they could try to cooperate, set a limit, and self-enforce it. (yes, free market lovers, that's a form of collusion). Blocksize is public, so cheating is possible but visible. If cooperation of the relevant majority fails (which I consider unlikely, as per the argument above), it makes sense to talk about voting processes and hard coded limits, but not before it has been established that this type of cooperation cannot be handled by individual actors.*

Speaking about authoritarianism, you don't seem to give a bat about being under the authority of Core devs no matter what they could decide. Pardon me but I fail to see your logic.

this really is the bottom line that is fundamental to open source coding and one which Bitcoin should not reject out of hand just b/c core dev spins a consensus mechanism as the ultimate goal to maintain control.

they will make more when the "cripplecoin" miners vote to make more .. they have to because people lose bitcoins all the time by losing their private keys to their cold storage wallets and stuff.. precious metals is a much more true deflationary and scarce supply than cryptos...

No, my argument is: Let the market decide which transactions get in.  Don't have an artificial cap that prevents that transactional market from operating.  There will be other technological solutions that trim the fat, but let the benefits of those solutions be the reason that people move some transactions off the main chain. Don't force them out.

The reason this is important is some not all miners have an interest in creating artificial scarcity. In the case of a couple they simply couldn't operate above a certain limit. Others could not particularly care.

As technology improves, bigger actors get into the game and the inherent economies of scale take place, orphan risk from including too many transactions will necessarily diminish and large miners will necessarily have an advantage and an ability to drive smaller ones out of business in a precipitated way. This is concerning because while mining consolidating into enormous corporations is by all account an obvious outcome, we cannot afford for the same for nodes.

It helps to think of it as a tragedy of the commons: absent of a blocksize it will eventually become in the miner's best interest to include as many transactions as possible in their blocks and consequently restricting access to governance of the network by way of bloating the blockchain.

And you think people will rush into unproven concept / untested sidechains right from their launch?  

But this mass thing is so not going to happen anyway, even if you "scale it" in advance. Sry but wake up, in its current form, bitcoin is out of the reach of regular sheeple.

People are too much anticipating, buying the fake dreams of them Antonopoulos, Gavin, Hearn et al., saving the planet with free insta-frappucinos.

That's really cool but the fact is OpenBazaar will deliver much faster than blockstream will.

And what case do you make about decentralized app that will rely on the blockchain? i.e. OpenBazaar and Joystream?

Crippling the blockchain would just cripple what you can build on top of it. 

So much praise for vaperware 

Bitcoin's killer app is whenever bank lets you create a savings account in bitcoin and you don't have to worry about ever losing your keys.

I know what Bitcoin's utility value to me is, but nobody has the whole picture. What are you implying is the "real" utility value?  Yes, we absolutely need to attract new capital.  How do you think we're gonna do it?

As long as there is fiat money, people will always first spend it since it is inflationary, so the scenario that bitcoin used for daily spending at large scale will never realize

Then the major usage left are long term saving and international remittance, both happens at very large size (over $100) and very low frequency (once a week/month)

In fact, majority of the transactions today in bitcoin network are pools paying miners and speculators deposit/withdraw from exchanges/gambling sites.

Gambling sites could occupy large amount of transaction capacity for blockchain, how to move their large amount of traffic offline is a challenge, maybe they should cooperate with bitcoin exchanges and do internal settlement without direct receiving coins from individual users

it doesnt matter what i think or used to think about bitcoin utility..  problem is i think making a tool to intimidate gun owners with "blockchain blacklists" is unacceptable .. bitcoin not going to be reserve currency .