| No, you have missed the essence of my post. Technology doesn't pick a side. I'm not arguing against that. In the relationship between Bitcoin and it's users/developers/miners/nodes there are of course the ideologies of each individual interacting with the protocol (libertarian, anarchist, etc...). Then of course there is the protocol itself. Then you can step back and look at the whole set of individuals each having their own (potentially hostile) philosophies, but still interacting with the protocol in the same way (i.e., they are following the rules) to achieve distributed consensus. How do you categorize that phenomena (embedded was the wrong word choice)? That is the question that I was referring to with the comment "philosophy of Bitcoin." Now, let's address some points in your post. >If the developers or miners could freely enact change on the network, then there would be a fuzzy line between the design and the implementation, and you could lay the philosophy on the implementation. Not one miner is in control? The two largest pools (Discus, ANT) are both located in China. Ghash just shut down it's cloud mining to take back control of the hashing power because of low prices. Eligius, a pool known for extending the will of Luke Jr. (submits to Bitcoin Core frequently) can change IsStandard to exclude OP_RETURN or Mastercoin transactions or whatever else. That is emergent behavior that is a result of someone's will. Blockstream has a handful of core devs and many influential minds in the space on their team to work on sidechains. Who knows what that will end up causing? Maybe a split in allegiances and a hard fork? You give Bitcoin more credit then is due. It still requires human input, after all. edit: we are arguing different points here, let's leave it at that. |