[berberous]

I think it's analogous to open source forks. A fork should have a good reason to fork, otherwise, indeed, why would anyone switch? So, why would someone fork? One or more of the following comes to mind:

1. Deep philosophical differences (e.g. Bitcoin Cash) or incompatible technical changes.

2. Removing rent-seeking (e.g., if a network/token is successful, but has some sort of greedy/rent-seeking aspect to it, I expect the community will just fork it away to remove that aspect).

3. Governance issues (e.g. if a token is setup such that its run by folks who have either actual or perceived control and those folks start failing to make good technical or other decisions, a competing faction might decide it's easier to fork than to wage war for either actual control or perceived control).

4. Greed (e.g. Bitcoin Platinum; these will generally fail in my view)

>> How does the community survive half a dozen forks (and having to specify which fork your precious.jpg is on?)

How does Linux survive its numerous forks? As to specifying which fork your file is on, why can't there be middleware that makes it easy to support multiple storage networks, just like today?

[marcus_holmes]

Why one middleware? Let's make ten different middlewares, each with their own technical differences and benefits in particular niche scenarios, right?

Let's have some intense ranty debates about which middleware is better for which scenario, and a couple of religious wars about which fork coupled with which middleware is "best".

Meanwhile, S3 just does the thing. It gets called "$3" by intense people who understand exactly why it sucks so bad. But for anyone who needs to store documents on a thing, and have someone to blame if the documents stop being on the thing, it works fine and it's much less fiddly to set up.

Yeah, I get the Linux analogy all too well...