"The decentralized nature of the Bitcoin system, managed by a small community of software developers, poses interesting issues for government regulators in how to apply laws and regulation, wrote Ed Felten, a professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University.
"The people who govern Bitcoin are an obvious point of leverage for regulators""
"The people who govern Bitcoin are an obvious point of leverage for regulators""
They are miles away from understading bitcoin properly
Yes, Felten loses credibility with words like "manage" and "govern", but I fear he's got a point in the sense that, for the moment, there is some vulnerability through the one-main-client bottleneck. If "they" harass the foundation and Gavin in particular, they could do much damage before the decentralized system heals itself. If the nature of the healing is that another small group steps in to write code, then "they" can go after the new small group. Broad, very broad decentralization of development might turn out to be essential, and it's not yet there even though several people contribute to each client update. Put another way, the protocol is very resilient, but the human infrastructure appears to have a (temporary?) major vulnerability - "arrest the ringleaders", "cut off the head".
In that vein... why is there a copyright notice on the 0.83 client startup page? That doesn't seem very decentralized.
