If I wrap my tin foil hat on tight enough, this could even be a grand conspiracy to centralize Bitcoin, backed by governments and central banks. If I were a government worried about cryptocurrencies threatening national monetary sovereignty, I would back efforts to centralize Bitcoin.
Bitcoin users -- much like consumers in a corporate-controlled world -- would begin to sacrifice trust to the most powerful companies (including mining outfits) if the hard fork is successful. That would set a useful precedent for governments who want more influence over Bitcoin (and by extension, all cryptocurrencies).
Bitcoin users -- much like consumers in a corporate-controlled world -- would begin to sacrifice trust to the most powerful companies (including mining outfits) if the hard fork is successful. That would set a useful precedent for governments who want more influence over Bitcoin (and by extension, all cryptocurrencies).
If sinister forces are attempting that then they're far too premature. Centralised services are still detested by many Bitcoin fans, not necessarily for spiritual reasons but more to do with them being shit most of the time.
Centralisation has produced thefts, delays, lock outs, failures. It has to be better than anything else for it to be seductive enough to lull people.
If I was a proper conspiracy theorist I'd point to Core as the real implants. Stuff like Jihan Wu's attempts to hijack BTC are so laughably amateurish that no serious player would instigate them. The proper Trojan is sitting right where people don't look in plain sight.
Ah, I think you've been around the block a few times. People in this space are by and large fairly clueless. That's the thing about the S curve; most people in the space are much closer to being noobs than experts. I saw a statistic today (on Kyle Torpey's Twitter) -- something like 40% of on-chain transactions on the network use Blockchain.info's service.
So, seeing their statement today (which basically copy/pasted Xapo's) was a bit unnerving. They can "passively harvest" their entire userbase to this fork if the miners switch chains, much like Ethereum did in the DAO hard fork. In that case, all the major wallets hard forked by default.
