Truth followed by falsehood. You af_newbie simply do not seem to understand religion.
Since we are on a bitcoin forum let me frame this in the language of bitcoin maybe that will help you understand.

What is bitcoin?
Bitcoin is an overarching consensus system organized around the concept of sound money. Those voluntarily participating in this consensus are required to behave transparently and do work with the ultimate aim of ensuring all network participants abide by the greater consensus. Nodes who choose not to follow the protocol, miners who submit invalid proof of work, and users who try to spend bitcoins without verified private keys, are simply ignored by the greater consensus.

Bitcoin is a form of group selection and group selection entails that group behavior be referenced to something outside the group. This something outside is the concept groups cohere and organize around. It is what they cooperate to promote. In the case of bitcoin the referenced object is the conceptual idea of a sound and ideal money.

What is religion (specifically ethical monotheism)?
Religion is also a form of group selection. It is the far more ambitious consensus that involves organizing humanity around the external concept of God. Once you understand this you understand the transformative nature of religion in both historic and modern human societies.

In any network some actors behave badly. They seek to impose their vision through force rather then consensus. In bitcoin we see this with the threat of a miner instigated contentious hardfork and also in the threat of nodes forcing change with a UASF. In religion we see it with certain sects seeking converts by the sword. In all cases this behavior is unhelpful and it will cease and fade out gradually over time as it becomes clear to all that voluntary consensus and cooperation not force is the ultimate path forward.

Religion is the proximate method of Group Selection in humans. Below is a nice article on this by Bruce Charlton if you are interested in reading more.
http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.com/2015/11/religion-as-proximate-method-of-group.html?m=1

As an aside this may also be why you will notice that the very religious on this forum often seem to be the most optimistic about bitcoin and confident in it's long term success. The religious have an innate affinity for consensus networks as they are already active members of one.  

When you are schizophrenic or delusional you might never be able to cure yourself.  You will remain delusional until you die. (True)

It does not matter that people are delusional when they do not cause harm to others or themselves.  But unfortunately, that is not the case when it comes to religious delusion.  These people are dangerous, borderline insane. (False)

When people think they have the right to kill others because of their delusion, that is a problem. (True)

In the future, religions will be treated as a medical issue.  We need to find the "religion" gene and eradicate it from the gene pool. (False)

A comment on my publisher’s website asks:

“Do you have any suggestions for finding faith? I see the necessity of religion, and Christianity in particular, but aside from history and cultural affinity I don’t have actual belief.”

My suggestion: Pray.

Also, consider that the Christian worldview is more coherent, robust, and rational than any secular worldview.
Our model explains things such as why stars look fair and beautiful to our eyes when it serves no credible Darwinian purpose to do so.

Our model explains the naturalistic fallacy, that is, the gap between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ which secular philosophy cannot explain, and some cannot even address.

Our model explains how free will can exist inside a deterministic universe. A materialist cannot even formulate the question in a rational way.

Our model explains why humans seek beauty. Social-evolutionary explanations for this are less convincing than astrology.

Our model explains how creatures with free will capable of grasping intellectual abstractions can arise in a universe which contains no such thing as intellectual abstractions.

Our model allows investigation of final causes in nature, without which nature cannot properly be understood.

Our model explains the prevalence of so many theists throughout history. The theory that over nine tenths of mankind, including some of the most brilliant thinkers in their age, were raving lunatics who hallucinate about imaginary sky beings is not credible and not supported by evidence.

Our model explains the various miracles and supernatural wonders that are in the older history books, and which, for no scientific reason, were excised from being reported.

Our model explains both why there is a plurality of religions and why there are striking similarities between them.

Our model explains the origin of the universe. By definition, if the universe were all that existed, exists and ever will exist, than a material cause for it is impossible.

Our modern explains the current hegemony of the West and makes clear the meaning and purpose of what otherwise seems like insane and suicidal attempts by the apparently sober and sane men on Left to undermine and destroy it.

Our model explains why you should not let your daughter whore around. She is immortal, and will outlast any nation, and language, any institution and human work on Earth.

Our model explains why you should not, once you have truly and deeply contemplated the vastness of the universe and the oppressive span of time to follow the death of everything you know, fall into despair, and end your meaningless life.

Our model gives something to live for nobler than one’s own pleasure seeking.

Our model avoids the logical paradox of asserting man can create meaning in life out of a vacuum. That would require an ability to create meaning out of meaninglessness, which is absurd.

Our model explains why men and women are different, and how we must arrange the dangerous mystery of the mating dance between the sexes to improve our chances to achieve joy rather than misery.

Our model gives rational hope of seeking the departed dead again.

Our model explains human psychology better than perverted old Freud dressing up old Greek myths in make believe, and far better than cranky old Thomas Hobbes and his cynicism.

Our model makes sense. Others are either incorrect, incomplete, or paradoxical, or lead ultimately to wrath or despair. Our model is the sole one which sees life as not futile and death as not bitter.

And, on an intellectual level, our model is the one to which to turn once your mind has become wearied with the reductionist, absurdist and postmodern models, which are in fact no models at all, but rather, are excuses why one should not make a model of the universe, nor seek any answers to deep questions.

It is the model to which to turn once you are heartily sick of hearing “It Just Happened” as the explanation for the origin of man, the universe, and all things.

Naturally, I do not expect any reader to take any of these conclusions as if they were persuasive arguments. Each would require a separate and in depth conversation. This is just a list, and a partial list at that, of the intellectually satisfying fullness of Christian thought. It is the scent and savor of the feast of Christian philosophy, not the meat and potatoes.

This list is not meant to argue the point. It is meant to whet the appetite of intellects starved and desiccated after vain attempt to feast on the shadows, dust and ashes of modern thought, and show the contrast.

There are additional reasons beyond this. All human reason can do is clear away false objections to faith. Faith itself is a supernatural gift bestowed by God to protect his own from the sudden, irrational loss of confidence in the self evident to which our foolish race is prone.

But yes, I would have liked to have a freedom currency (even if it were ultimately used to the demise of humanity which is in any case unavoidable at a certain point), what bitcoin *pretended* to be, and of which I'm now convinced that not only it will never be that, but it will even be a huge obstacle for a freedom currency to arise.   However, apart from that, bitcoin *is* a dynamical system that will do SOMETHING (but that's not "become a freedom currency"), and it is interesting to observe the dynamics of how it is acting, independent of any "desire".

A transparent, hierarchical future is shear horror.  My only interest in crypto was to have a growing, anonymous, underground economy that can bribe the transparent economy and politics to death without ever revealing anything about its inner workings.  This would then be the way in which the machines could take over society without any of us ever knowing how it could happen.
If you can have a large underground anonymous economy, that can buy homicide, that can buy all deciders (economical, political, judges, military...) etc... to make them part of a system they are not aware off, you can finally make a real "deep state" nobody knows about, which could in the end be a network of machines without any human in control, to subjugate humanity and make unknown machines the new dominant species on earth.  That's what I saw as the future of crypto.

Let's do a peer to peer gold transaction. I'll pay you double spot for an ounce of gold on delivery. Let's see about those $0 transaction fees.

Here is my address. https://www.google.com/maps/@-43.1382064,147.2102165,17z

This is simply a centralized power game, nothing else ; business as usual.  You will have a hierarchical system with "a leader / king" supported by an "aristocracy of important people" and then the "populace" that is made to cheer for their leaders and to beg for solutions to their problems.  You will have palace revolutions, where some usurper will manipulate the populace to replace the corrupt king and his corrupt aristocracy by himself and his aristocracy.

The only thing crypto had to offer, was immutability.  Yes, that induces "obsolescence" if it were badly designed, but there is no problem with that.  Crypto didn't need to be eternal ; hard forking is the way forward, offering myriads of choices, like in a free market where each individual entity can offer his fork, and see if it works in the market ; not by collectivism into a uniform monopoly that is the feast of aristocracy.  

True decentralisation leads to immutability, simply because if you would have, say, 5 million users, and 100 000 miners in the network, all of them having small fractions of mining hash rate, all of them running hundreds of different node software by hundreds of different teams, there would simply be no way in even contacting them ; as most of them would be anonymous.  There wouldn't even be a platform to PROPOSE changes, as there's no way to know if even a very small fraction of the concerned users would look at it.  

There are, as always, only two kinds of human regulation: collectivist ones, and individualist ones.   Communism versus free market.  Kings versus anarchies.  As history has shown, anarchies usually contain power vacuums that install Kings, who abuse of their power to collect more wealth and power, until the system breaks down under its own weight, where a new power vacuum is filled in by another King.

Well, I hope you all have fun with your Bitcoin fork. I'll be selling my Barrycoins, TYVM

This is why, if this kind of change is, in the end, possible, it is taking away from crypto its reason of existence.   After all, if such kind of change is possible because "people vote", then we get the same kind of manipulation, power abuse, and everything else we already have in our current societies without the crypto hassle.  If crypto has any value, it would reside in the inability to change the rules no matter how much one tries.  If "graved in stone" means "graved in stone until someone modifies it", duh.

Sustained increases in living conditions result only from gains in knowledge. Top-down control plays in role in the the organization needed to facilitate the emergence of new knowledge. Top-down control facilitates its own removal for new knowledge eventually circumvents and undermines the prior order allowing society to climb to higher energy systems. The new system is also one of top-down control but the knowledge gained allows for an overall relaxation of the imposed order increasing economic degrees-of-freedom.

The evolution of the social contract is a progressive climb to higher potential energy systems with increased degrees of freedom. The state of nature begat tribalism. Tribalism grew into despotism. Despotism advanced into monarchy. Monarchies were replaced by republics. It is likely that in the near future republics will be consumed by world government, and perhaps someday world government will evolve into decentralized government.

Each iteration has a common theme for each advance increases the number of individuals able to engage in cooperative activity while lowering the number of individuals able to defect. Each iteration increases the sustainable degrees of freedom the system can support.  

It appears you have involuntarily stumbled upon the fact that force is the only valid consensus mechanism in the universe.

Well, that could be the case, but it would mean that the Nash equilibrium is not stable in time.  As such, it would be a randomly evolving system where nothing is "graved in stone", and the whole invention of crypto would in fact turn out to be a complicated thing that doesn't achieve anything else but what we have always known: a hierarchical system where the upper layers modify the rules at unexpected moments to suit their advantages and which would reinforce their positions by the insider-knowledge they only posses about the new rules.

This could very well be the final outcome of the bitcoin experiment.  But if there's a hierarchy of decision makers, it has nothing decentralized.

Decentralization for decentralization's sake has no purpose.  However, decentralization as a tool for immutability makes sense.

...
Of course, there are MANY Nash equilibria.  There are as many Nash equilibria as there are thinkable protocols ! But ONCE you are in ONE Nash equilibrium the system cannot leave it.  It is only if there is a concerted effort that makes MANY entities decide TOGETHER to jump to another equilibrium, that this new equilibrium becomes the active Nash equilibrium ; however, BY DEFINITION, "a large part of all entities colluding" is exactly what is the end of decentralization, which, by hypothesis, means that entities don't collude.

So, a decentralized system (one in which entities don't collude and have no central leadership) where game theory is hence applicable, that finds itself in a Nash equilibrium, will remain in that Nash equilibrium for ever.  The Nash equilibrium being the protocol, it means that the protocol will remain the same for ever, hence is immutable.

QED.
...

Decentralised systems are intricately linked to the idea of self-organisation—a phenomenon in which local interactions between components of a system establish order and coordination to achieve global goals without a central commanding influence. The rules specifying these interactions emerge from local information and in the case of biological (or biologically-inspired) agents, from the closely linked perception and action system of the agents. These interactions continually form and depend on spatio-temporal patterns, which are created through the positive and negative feedback that the interactions provide.

If the system is truly decentralized, the protocol should become entirely immutable.

Ok, people.  I'm tired of fucking around with ambiguous definitions:  Is bitcoin decentralized?  Does bitcoin have value? etc.  I have decided to address these issues from proof of work to proof of stake where a normal human can easily quantify if Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency has value and whether it will live or die:

http://steemit.com/steemit/@r0achtheunsavory/the-r0ach-report-14-defining-if-cryptocurrency-has-a-value-or-zero-value-from-a-fundamental-scientific-perspective

It's relatively short to read, but if you want the TLDR version, my stance is that proof of stake has no value whatsoever and I explain why, and proof of work with ASIC is almost functionally the same thing (externalized proof of stake) in practice and would also have no value.  I don't think anyone will find a valid argument against this post.

As for proof of work - the basis of bitcoin - this will be an unpopular view but I really see it as just a form of externalized proof of stake in practice and not an actual open entropy system. Energy costs are not uniform across the globe so this causes the transaction validators (miners) to centralize into something resembling a matrix covering the earth:

This is a big centralization pressure, but arguably not a terminal one if you believe the energy costs on the planet are not outrageously lopsided in uniformity. The next evolution of the system was the introduction of ASIC mining. This is yet another layer of centralization on top of energy costs which I believe is not just additive, but more like multiplicative or quadratic in nature with the previous layer. Now your matrix of miners tends to look something like this instead:

It's a completely arbitrary number, but once you've reached a point where you can fit all the actors together into a large car where they can collude and form an OPEC-style cartel, doing things like blocking transactions from people they don't like, setting transaction fees abnormally high, or forking the network, you obviously no longer have any form of Nash equilibrium and the system I would say has become inherently valueless. No, this does not magically mean proof of stake now has value; it never had value in the first place.

I don't know what you are talking about.  The plan seems to be somewhat vague.

First, if there were consensus to agree to seg wit then some of the witholders from signaling segwit could start signaling seg wit.. but they wont agree to signal seg wit without a 2mb increase first and in the form of a hardfork... so?  What does that mean?  

It means that the supposed supporters of a compromise do not agree to signal seg wit unless they get a 2 mb increase in the form of a hard fork.  A hardfork is not going to fly because it is not necessary.

seg wit has already been vetted and approved but a 2mb increase has not.. so that would need to be coded and tested... Anyone did that yet?  

So, how can core just agree?  You want them to agree to a hardfork?  You said that no change in governance.. ?  Looks like the threshold is 80% rather than 95%, and that appears to be a change in governance, no?  change from 95% to 80%, right?  that is a change?

It's an attempt to change governance and to accomplish such in the form of a hard fork.... A hardfork is not necessary. so why agree to something that is not necessary and that is problematic and that is going to set bad precedent for future take overs.. especially if they agree to either a hardfork or a change in governance.. ?
 

The lack of code is probably a good thing at this juncture. I have been following this dispute only recently but the strong impression I get is that the only possible path to consensus on something like the miner agreement is if the code is ultimately produced, vetted and shipped by the core developers.

The miner agreement at this stage is simply a proposal. That proposal must now be vetted by the rest of the community to determine if a grudging consensus can be built around it.

Hopefully such a consensus will be possible. It strikes me as a far healthier path forward then stagnation forever in the current state or a civil war leading to a split into two coins.
...
It appears very clear that regardless of their technical merits neither

1) Variable blocksize
or
2) SegWit alone without a block size increase

can achieve consensus at this moment in bitcoin history. Thus neither are viable pathways forward right now.

Some compromise position must be adopted. It does not matter if it is a perfect solution. All it needs to be is safe and good enough to achieve widespread if grudging consensus.
...

There is fundamental disagreement in the community regarding on-chain versus off-chain scaling. Best hope of a breakthrough is a half-measure that allows both sides time to show what their solution offers.

Personally I hope to see some variation of Barry Silbert segwit agreement coded up vetted and released by the Bitcoin Core team as this is the only option on the table that appears to have any chance of achieving consensus.
...

We don't need to make a final determination between on-chain and off-chain scaling at this time. Kicking the can down the road by allowing both to be tried in parallel under the vetting and safety provided by the Bitcoin Core team sounds pretty good to me.

Plus though it is not the primary concern here it is worth mentioning that a successful consensus solution to this problem would likely be very good to everyone's pocketbook.

Thanks. As I said earlier I've already predicted what I believe will be the outcome, it's just how we're going to get there that's left to determine.

What I really don´t get.

Shouldn't avoiding a chain split be the absolute top priority?

I cannot really see a scenario where both coins combined (after a split) will be worth the same as the single coin before.

So users and miners should do everything to avoid that.