[gzer0]

I think your own ignorance of Bitcoin's history is showing. Centralized decision-making saved Bitcoin.

"On March 11, 2013, Bitcoin experienced a technical crisis. Versions 0.7 and 0.8 of the software diverged from each other in behavior due to a bug, causing the block chain to “fork” into two.

The optimal course of action (and, in retrospect, the only one that avoided serious risks to the system) was first proposed and justified 16 minutes later, and the developers reached consensus on it a mere 20–25 minutes after that. Shortly thereafter — barely an hour after the discovery of the fork — the crisis response had effectively and successfully concluded.

Without the central co-ordination of the Bitcoin Core developers and the strong trust that the community places in them, it is inconceivable that adopting this counterintuitive solution could have been successfully accomplished."

[1] https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/07/28/analyzing-the-2013-...

[jzm2k]

I think there is a major difference between consensus-breaking bug which unites the community in adopting a new change and a BIP which proposes a change to the network and modifies the consensus rules. But I fully agree with you that it is possible to reach a consensus about some change to the protocol but as the network grows it becomes harder and harder.

Secondly, this is 9 years ago and the Bitcoin network has grown quite a bit since then, meaning back then it was quite a bit smaller undertaking in getting the majority of the network to adapt the bug fix than it would be today. The core developers are also very paranoid about introducing these bugs which you can see for yourself by browsing the open PRs and verifying that anything that even remotely touches the consensus code is very heavily scrutinized.

[bb88]

I think the only thing that matters is the miners. If the miners decide they want a change (like more total BTC to mine, or more BTC per transaction, or removing the difficulty halving) they'll fork it themselves and force everyone to move with them.

"Really nice bitcoins you have there, it would be a shame if a anyone did a 51% attack on them."