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Yes and no. They didn't just control the repo, but they somehow managed to convince the miners to support them. Exchanges and users simply defaulted to "the lo
by lawn 3y ago
Yes and no.
They didn't just control the repo, but they somehow managed to convince the miners to support them. Exchanges and users simply defaulted to "the longest chain is Bitcoin", ensuring their victory. So they weren't alone.
But Bitcoin's truly decentralized nature allows for forks, where if you disagree with the development direction you can always go your own way. So the spirit of Bitcoin lives on in other projects (both via forks and via projects with no shared history with Bitcoin).
> You're claiming that just two individuals have had a significant negative impact on a project that was intended to be free from central control. That in itself seems like a failure of the project's goals.
Yes, it was (and is) still a major failure of the project's goals.
- tw04 3y agoThat’s like saying democracy allows voters in the US to elect anyone. Sure, on paper, but here in the real world that’s just not happening. With a few minor tweaks like ranked choice, it could, but the powers that be will never get onboard. Similarly bitcoin is decentralized in that “anyone can fork it” but reality is without backing from major players, that will never gain any traction at all. So no, functionally it is nothing approaching decentralized.
- ETH_start 3y agoThe miners didn't support them at all. The majority supported the hard fork, and initiatives like Gavin Andresen's BitcoinXT to implement it. But the main Bitcoin forum on Reddit started censoring any advocacy for a block size limit increase, which made a clean hard fork impossible.
- lawn 3y agoInitially you're right. At the crucial point they did however convince the miners to support a Segwit + blocksize increase, which pulled away the support. Of course, it's obvious that it was just a bait-and-switch and the blocksize increase is nowhere to be seen, and will probably never happen.
- ETH_start 3y agoThey were able to execute the SegWit2x bait and switch, and shenanigans before it, only after the forums had already been censored and they could promote UASF as a threat against the miners. Ultimately, miners would only support a hard fork if a super majority went along with it and with the major forums being censored that was going to be impossible. Without the censorship there would have been a super majority supporting the hard work given the sentiment on the forums at that time.