The BU schism has made me realize that anything with this much money involved is bound to get really political. This reminded me of the stories of the dread pirate roberts hiring hells angels to eliminate the people trying to blackmail him on silk road. When you have millions upon millions of dollars, and someone tries to take them, often the best solution, or the only is to eliminate the threat. Eat or be eaten, as they say.
It's interesting because this recent drama kind of reminds me of an organic system of checks and balances, with the power of the exchanges as a check to the power of the miners. If bitcoin were ever to reach the volume of a major currency like GBP or RUB, there is no doubt that there would start to be intrigues of people trying to threaten and destroy the network for personal gain.
There are many people at this point whose livelihood depends on bitcoin, and when I saw someone suggest that a large number of transactions of the bitcoin network were fake, in order to make people believe that BU was necessary and force a fork, the next thought that occured to me would be to trace the source of these fake transactions and simply destroy the computers of those causing them.
Basically in this scenario bitcoin becomes a nation with no borders, with the early adopters as the aristocracy. Forks would have to be defended against with a full army, including intelligence, counter intel, propaganda department, and and international strike force with bases in every country. Sounds a lot like a state for a project initially beloved by libertarians.
BU is sort of like a bloodless proto-coup attempt.
This has big implications for bitcoin as an alternative to the global banking cartel. As the power of the bitcoin market increases, the aristocracy is likely to face the same temptation and corruption that the present elite face. As some have observed before, bitcoin is not a fix for human nature.
What does this mean for your average bitcoin user/believer? How are we supposed to chart our course in this increasingly politicized bitcoin space?
If you did not mentioned about spam attacks made to make bitcoin unlimited necessary for the bitcoin system then I would not thought of it at all. It is just a sad view to think that peoples greed will cause bitcoin network to suffer. There are many people whose jobs is bitcoin based like me will be affected a lot and its all because of the whim of the greedy individuals who have big influence on the bitcoin network.
