Someone many pages back linked the Gavin interview,
https://youtu.be/B8l11q9hsJMPay special attention at roughly 1:14:40 , the first and maybe only interesting question, let me paraphrase:
Brian: "so, if this fork succeeds, how will decisions be made in the future?"
Gavin: "Mike Hearn will be the benevolent dictator, he will be the ultimate decision maker."
...
He goes on to explain how he does not want to be in complete control, nor do any of the devs that currently have commit ability, but he is completely happy and ok with Mike as the sole controller and decider. He even goes in to mention that future changes will be much easier and will happen much more quickly once this change is made.
I know XT is already dead, but I just wanted to point out to anyone that was still unconvinced that Gavin has been compromised... He is either completely brain dead, or he is deliberately trying to end bitcoin's function as a permissionless, censorship-proof means of storing and transmitting value.
Hearn would only be the dictator of XT development, not the protocol. XT is only one implementation of BIP101. Other implementations would be compatible, as XT is currently compatible with core. ANY change in the code that would make XT incompatible would orphan XT, not the other implementations. Anyone can write code using core or BIP101 components and run it on test net to see if it works and then release it into the wild. This is open source. XT will only succeed if people use it.
A certain amount of skepticism is healthy, but I think we all need to take off our tin foil hats. We just end up talking past each other and getting nowhere.
I read the BITfury white paper in support of BIP100. There are some good points in it, but it doesn't address the big problems that are holding up infrastructure development and mainstream adoption.
Entrepreneurs can't build business models around how miners may or may not vote. Issues such as node centralization are secondary. A fully validating node is and likely will always be many orders of magnitude cheaper and easier to setup and run than a profitable mining operation.
It seems that a major concern for BIP100 supporters is that miners with slow internet connections are disadvantaged by larger blocks. Assuming for the sake of argument that this is true, why should the rest of us subsidize these slow miners? They are mostly in China which means that if they have less of a competitive advantage then mining will likely become LESS centralized with large blocks rather than more.
Miners are producers. They are essential to the network but we know what happens when producers are in control of the economy. We saw it in the Soviet Union, North Korea, East Germany, Cuba, Venezuela, and Red China. Rent-seeking behavior kills growth. In the free market, the consumer is king which is actually more fair because we are all consumers.
If we want bitcoin to survive, it has to grow. If we want it to grow, it has to scale. If we want it to scale, then we have to make some trade-offs that will benefit various people and groups differently. This is unavoidable. What is also unavoidable is technology proliferation. If we don't fix this scaling problem, banksters are going to jack our tech, make their own coin(s), and wave at us as they leave us in the dust.
Scale or die.
