It is almost garanteed that this idea (destroying coins) will never be implemented
The quote above absolutely SHOULD be true, and I hope it is, but what do you read into the quote below?
All of these hypothetical desires fail right out of the gate based on the fact that any fork of this nature creates a new coin and this new coin is no longer Bitcoin.
Destroying coins is a softfork. Everyone would automatically accept it.
In many cases, this is a huge problem. For example, China could right now freeze all the bitcoins of people who haven't been ID-verified by the Chinese authorities. (Since the vast majority of mining power is in China.) The defense against this is:
1. Improve anonymity features so that specific coins can't be tied to specific people.
2. Be prepared as a community to immediately hardfork to a different PoW if miners do anything like this. In fact, I think that a document should be written and signed by all of the major players which would specify exactly the lines that miners must not be allowed to cross, to avoid ambiguity/chaos if it actually happens.
But in the case of deleting insecure BTC, it seems possible to me, especially if quantum computers and coins being "un-lost" start looking more like a big looming threat and less like a theoretical discussion, that there could be sufficient support for the action that the risk of any substantial hardfork effort splitting Bitcoin would be low.
It seems to start out cocky and almost imply that it doesn't matter what the early adopters / true believers think because the core developers have their own agenda, but then it ends looking like double-speak when also mentioning a hard fork. Does this mean the only way to prevent a soft fork is with enough support for a hard fork against it? Do you really think ideology will beat greed in that scenario? Don't get me wrong, I understand that if the greedy side won, they would likely actually be shooting the collective in the foot and we'd technically all lose, but how much say does Theymos really have in Core development? How true to the founding values of bitcoin is the current core development team? This all makes me very nervous and reaffirms my belief that we need multiple implementations (even if XT and Classic had their flaws, at least they could theoretically keep development decentralized). I actually ran XT even though I had a problem with many of Hearn's ideas long before it was created, but I understood that I could switch away after big blocks happened so that I wouldn't support the other more evil aspects of that particular implementation. I've been running Unlimited since XT died, but more recently I've been considering switching back to Core even though I only support segwit as a hard fork with other fixes to prevent drastic soft forks. Right now I'm thinking I shouldn't switch back after all...
ETA: To be clear, I'm really looking for input here. I've re-read that post many times. My comments above are based on it sounding like:
"You can't stop the destruction of those coins, because we can force it with a soft fork and you can't get enough support to undo that with a risky hard fork"
However, other times, even though I would be against the potentially supportable hard fork, it sounds like a much more even keeled:
"We should prevent soft forks that would allow destroying coins, but even then there will probably be sufficient support for a risky hard fork to destroy them"
