[maaku]

> They can independently decide to change the rules of the 'Bitcoin protocol' a) at will b) retroactively. I cannot reconcile this with claims that Bitcoin is 'does not require trust' or is 'decentralized.'"

Sigh. Your post was a great up until the very end.

Bitcoin developers can't push any rules on anybody. They haven't the power.

A majority of bitcoin hashpower can enforce a strictly stronger set of validation rules, as indeed happened here. Is it a problem that a very small number of individuals represent policy for >50% of the bitcoin hash rate? Yes. Is this intrinsic to the nature of bitcoin? No. And it's something that people are working to fix.

Can a majority of hashpower arbitrarily rewrite history? Yes, but only with a very real opportunity cost to themselves. And that is the rules of bitcoin since the beginning -- although in reality people would probably choose to reject a long reorg. Some level of human intervention is a good thing.