I have taken sides, but against the general core development process and the corporate interests that are permeating it. Yes, blockstream is not core, but they have exerted a tremendous amount of influence on the team and direction. In addition to directly employing many core developers, sponsoring contractors, and tirelessly advocating for a vision of Bitcoin that frankly differs substantially from anything put forth in Satoshi's paper. It's not a conspiracy theory, I've watched it unfold in person for years.

Even if most of what you say seems to be completely false, I wouldn't even worry a tiny bit even if it was true, in the same way I don't worry by the fact that many Gnome developers are paid by Red Hat.

You are making the mistake of equating Bitcoin development with other open source projects. It's just not comparable to Gnome, Linux, or any other open source development. If I don't like the gnome developers I just don't run their code, but if I don't like the consensus driven code of Bitcoin my only choice is to sell. The stickiness of the implementation is extremely important to the overall discussion.

> but if I don't like the consensus driven code of Bitcoin my only choice is to sell

Wrong. What's the choice you have when you disagree with what the maintainers of an opensource project do? You can fork. You're welcome to fork at any time. And in fact this is what we're seeing these days: an attempt of a fork. I believe that, as with the majority of the forks in the opensource world, the fork will not succeed, because the alternative developers are less capable.

You seem to be missing my point.

I can fork Linux right now, make some random changes and I have a fully functioning equivalent system with those minor changes.

I can fork Bitcoin right now, make some random changes to the consensus code, and I have a useless token that has absolutely no value.

These two things, are not the same. How can you possibly refute that?

> I can fork Bitcoin right now, make some random changes to the consensus code, and I have a useless token that has absolutely no value.

The value and usefulness of the token you would create is directly proportional to how good your change (divergence) to the software is.

Because you can take those minor changes deploy to a smaller group where a decentralized exchange is required. For example an ad buying network. Or you can make your own coin and market it.

It's the same as forking facebook's website code if they allowed that. You have a product you can use but without the scale of people and data it would give you a similiar level of value.

People have been downvoting you because you're wrong, but someone should say why: the difference between your two examples is that a social network has some sort of value with a limited network, but a currency only has value where it is accepted.