For those not following the drama, there has been an organized attempt for the last 6+ months to take over Bitcoin.
A fake "grass roots" campaign was started on Reddit, where numerous sock puppet accounts were used to bombard the /r/bitcoin subreddit with calls to change Bitcoin's "block size limit" to a much larger number.
This would allow more transactions per second, at the cost of hurting Bitcoin's P2P decentralization (the main thing it is good at). These posters claimed there was a dire, urgent need to do this immediately, and used spam transaction attacks on the network to make it look necessary.
They also used downvoting/upvoting scripts to push their posts to the top, and to censor the developer's
responses (reddit hides posts with a -5 score; any post by developers instantly would be downvoted to that level).
They harassed the developers with constant personal attacks, to the point that it became impossible for them
to engage the community. They also flooded the development mailing list, and many developers unsubscribed.
As for the "block size increase", an absurd number was picked (20x increase), and knowing that the developers would not go along with it, the "solution" proposed was a fork of the both the software and the network itself called "Bitcoin XT".
All but 2 of the 90+ Bitcoin developers thought this was a terrible idea, especially since they have
come up with much safer and better solutions to achieve the same goal (scaling up the transactions per second).
Yet when this fork attempt failed to gain any support, a better funded, even more aggressive second attempt (oddly named "Bitcoin Classic") started being promoted.
It is being pushed by the CEO of Coinbase (the author of this blog post) and backed by some of the other bitcoin exchange's CEOs.
If Bitcoin Core did the sensible thing and started to increase blocks and working towards that goal, no takeover would happen. Quite the opposite, Bitcoin Core is now taken over by developers from Blockstream company, pushing their own (vaporware) product and doing changes to Bitcoin that will help them. And also adding, with little (non-censored) discussion, controversial features like Replace-By-Fee.
How can you talk about decentralization when the few important people, who can decide about the future, can literally sit to one table and decide. How can you talk about decentralization when there is one person controlling all discussions and actively censoring all negativity against him, or against current bitcoin core.
There is no long-term solution for scaling than resizing the blocks right now. SegWit is great, but only a one-time thing.
The only thing that is missing from your comment is that there is conspiracy by Big Banks and Evil Statists to silently destroy bitcoin (by making it more usable).
Yeah, this particular mess has been exacerbated by Reddit being a terrible technical discussion forum, and it's tendacy to "hivemind".
Also your history forgot "Bitcoin Unlimited", a fork which had a brief stint of popularity between Bitcoin XT and Bitcoin Classic. IMO it's the worst technical design of the three - it simply fails to enforce the block size limit, which would lead to very high orphan rates if miners started to adopt it. The other two had miner voting systems to avoid this problem.
The best technical discussion tends to happen on IRC, for those who want to ask questions and not deal with Reddit.
Your post contains a number of allegations with no proof whatever. Can you provide evidence of any "fake" campaign, of "sockpuppets" of "voting bots".
I mean, your post is psyop, otherwise called a "mind fuck", just a number of statements with zero evidence to discredit valid opinions by not in any way engaging them.
While you of course use outright censorship, banning, ddosing of nodes, secret conferences, and other dark black hat social engineering techniques you should be ashamed of.
So that's why XT is being censored and fought with DDoS attacks? Because the fans of Core did nothing wrong? There is math showing the numbers works, yet it was met with FUD and all problems with no change was denied completely.
It is just the proof that Reddit voting system does not function properly, not being able to down vote with a karma below a certain value is essential.
If this was introduced, lots of random sub reddits would spring up where bots would post rubbish and upvote each other until they got the required karma.
"Libertarianism (Latin: liber, "free") is a political philosophy that upholds liberty as its principal objective. Libertarians seek to maximize autonomy and freedom of choice, emphasizing political freedom, voluntary association, and the primacy of individual judgment."
I do not see here to support of trolls who were running a campaign against bitcoin on a platform that lacks of basic functionality to have a useful discussion about technical subjects.
Recent dramas highlight the underlying power structures in Bitcoin and reddit, so it's now clear that neither is truly libertarian, but Bitcoin was often promised as a libertarian alternative to traditional currencies, and reddit was once promised as a libertarian "bastion of free speech on the worldwide web".
Perhaps the lesson here is that libertarian promises are, at best, temporary.
You're on to something, but libertarianism probably isn't the right target for your conclusions. This is more of an example of how movements that seek to protray themselves as structureless end up with power structures that are less responsive to their communities. See the 1970s feminist essay The Tyranny of Structurelessness[1] by Jo Freeman for a timeless example.
If that essay were written today another great example for it would be Occupy Wall Street. I saw first hand at OccupyDC how structurelessness led to tyranny of the least shameful, the most bullying, and the loudest.
A fake "grass roots" campaign was started on Reddit, where numerous sock puppet accounts were used to bombard the /r/bitcoin subreddit with calls to change Bitcoin's "block size limit" to a much larger number.
This would allow more transactions per second, at the cost of hurting Bitcoin's P2P decentralization (the main thing it is good at). These posters claimed there was a dire, urgent need to do this immediately, and used spam transaction attacks on the network to make it look necessary.
They also used downvoting/upvoting scripts to push their posts to the top, and to censor the developer's responses (reddit hides posts with a -5 score; any post by developers instantly would be downvoted to that level).
They harassed the developers with constant personal attacks, to the point that it became impossible for them to engage the community. They also flooded the development mailing list, and many developers unsubscribed.
As for the "block size increase", an absurd number was picked (20x increase), and knowing that the developers would not go along with it, the "solution" proposed was a fork of the both the software and the network itself called "Bitcoin XT".
All but 2 of the 90+ Bitcoin developers thought this was a terrible idea, especially since they have come up with much safer and better solutions to achieve the same goal (scaling up the transactions per second).
Yet when this fork attempt failed to gain any support, a better funded, even more aggressive second attempt (oddly named "Bitcoin Classic") started being promoted.
It is being pushed by the CEO of Coinbase (the author of this blog post) and backed by some of the other bitcoin exchange's CEOs.
I think the creator of bittorrent, Bram Cohen, sums up what developers and the larger technical community are thinking about these takeover attempts- https://twitter.com/bramcohen/status/697705876337995776