https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=196259.60Can't reply to this because <insert generic insult here> forum agreement. Come on, at least give us categories to post under!
It just shows that while Bitcoin is working using irrefutable mathematics it is still under the personal whim of gullible people thus rendering it unstable, perhaps even more unstable because the whole thing is managed by financially unstable individuals who would sell their soul happily to wreck everything we have worked so hard for.
Kind of reminds me of how totalitarian governments acquires control, first scare the masses with the threat of terrorism (S.Dice) then ask them to surrender their rights for the government (Gavin) to protect them, then continue spewing propaganda claiming anyone to resist is a traitor.
Ideally, you would have a "tree" system where Bitcoin separates into two different builds, perhaps liberal/conservative style (even though both are identical in this case) and users would be able to "vote" to choose which build they want to download and use.
I think that the person writing this post should reconsider. To address his first point, there is no monetary incentive to this - why accuse people of "selling their soul" if it's for free?
On the second, not only does it reek of conspiracy theories, but misses a rather key two points: Firstly, nobody is forced to use that client, you can fork and use your own, and if enough people agree with you it becomes the 'de facto' bitcoin. The second is that the patch to bitcoin
only affects miners and
can be "turned off" or tweaked by users, so it in no way alters the inherent democracy of the system - it in fact gives the users more, not less, power.
For the third point, not only would the forked build "voting" approach be open to attack and technologically infeasible, it would also be far inferior to the current approach, which is that you can edit all this on the command line.
Not only this, but there's always the other option: Fork the client yourself, or get someone to do so! (If your ideal client hasn't been made, that is.) Nothing could be more democratic than that. If you convince people to use your client (as Gavin most likely will with his change), then that doesn't make you a big scary dictator who deserves words like "corporate", "fascist" and "sell-out" to be liberally applied to his name, but simply somebody influential in a true democracy.
