The economic incentives dictates noone want to shoot their own golden goose. Bitcoin wouldnt have worked if your scenario can happen.
Game theory 101
Btw, your scenario is exactly the "worst case" that Mike said in the video chat interview " technical mess" he said. To prevent such attacks, having checkpoints and ignoring the longest chain are the only viable defense mechanism.
Sadly, his words got twisted around and misunderstood by a bunch of idiots, who are also quickly against BitcoinXT and call him dictator.
In this case, you are not shooting your own golden goose, but the competitor's, and make your eggs sell better. It is strange that even Mike and Gavin know such kind of risk is high, they still go ahead with their plan to prepare a fork which brings high uncertainty
I don't know how long they have been fighting each other, but that kind of thing is a norm among a group of decision makers in large organizations. But since bitcoin is not a centralized organization, this traditional way of working is outdated
In fact this revealed one weakness of bitcoin is its centralization of the development, so maybe we should set one dynamic blocksize rule and forbid any future change in protocol to permanently remove this political risk. Gold never changed its property for thousands of years, that's the reason it can be trusted
75% of hash power would be a good indicator whos the winner.
You're assuming the rest of 25% decide to burn all their capital because .... they're not having it their ways. Right.
Businesses only care one thing : return on investment. Miners are simply rewarded for their services.
Even if XT gained 80% of hash power, bitcoin is going to crash, because more and more people will leave, as they understand this is just another version of USD with another group of dictators
It seems you are not a miner. Industry scale miners are essentially distributed central bank of bitcoin monetary system, they usually have the best possible knowledge and also the wealthiest in this whole ecosystem (It's impossible to design an ASIC miner if you don't know how bitcoin works under the hood), they of course participate in all kinds of political movements, and this is already a potential danger, so that in the future, government only need to control 5-10 guys to control the whole bitcoin network
Dictator? You realize that it is more like a democracy? Gavin and Hearn can't take away bitcoin. Every user of bitcoin votes what he wants to use. Core or XT. That sounds more like a democracy to me than a dictatorship.
And even when XT would win, for some reason, then 99% of the users would switch back to core when core implements bigger blocks. Because the ideas hearn has are simply too dangerous.
It's democracy...
