[kibwen]

Even still, AIUI the problem with Bitcoin is that a buggy implementation is capable of accidentally hard-forking the blockchain (as demonstrated by https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bitcoin-network-shaken-... ). The existence of a protocol specification document alone wouldn't have prevented that. My question is whether Ethereum actually has some clever mechanism to ameliorate this threat, or whether it's just hoping that the existence of multiple implementations means that no one client ever gains more than 50% market share (and hence any hard-fork that results from an incompatible implementation wouldn't require a central authority to step in to determine which was the "true" chain).