And not everyone listened.
> At the end of the day, when consensus breaks in unforeseen circumstances-- whether through a bug or an attack (the difference is purely syntactic)--people turn to the developers to tell them which consensus ruleset to follow.
Not everyone turns to the developers.
In a decentralized system, people have the ability to disagree with the developers and literally anyone else you might name as a central authority, and have that disagreement make a meaningful difference (a fork). That's obviously significant.
> If you disagree with the developers, your chain gets called something else, as we've seen with Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum Classic.
Who cares?
When the Bitcoin fork happened, I supported the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. I don't give a crap about the name. If I get the blockchain implementation I want, you can call it whatever you want.
In other words, someone creating Bitcoin Cash doesn't somehow prove that Bitcoin is decentralized... We still need to analyze each currency individually if we're going to have any meaningful conversation about their merits.
No, everyone does not consider it a different currency, you consider it a different currency. The name changed, sure, but again, who cares? A rose by another name would smell as sweet.
Calling either BTC or BCH a different currency from the original bitcoin really just shows a lack of understanding of what a fork is. Both BTC and BCH have made changes that weren't in the original BTC.
Um ok we're spreading lies now. Do you have evidence that the vast majority of people consider Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin to be the same currency and I'm alone in considering these 2 blockchains 2 different currencies?
No, I didn't say that.
I'm saying that neither Bitcoin nor Bitcoin Cash are identical the original Bitcoin. Both have added changes, and this will be true of any blockchain that is being actively developed. In fact, to say that Bitcoin before the fork is the same coin as Bitcoin when Satoshi made it is also a bit off, because there were changes added before the fork, too.
I'm saying that saying that considering either one of these to be different from the original Bitcoin is a moot point, because any conceptualization of being the same coin doesn't really fit. The only way you could say that any variation of Bitcoin is the same coin is by saying that they build on the same blockchain, but both BTC and BCH fit that criteria.
You've focused in on the names people call the coins, which is pretty much the least important way one could say that coins are the same--implementation is far more relevant than name.
In the end, the only thing that really makes sense to say is that modern BTC and BCH are both variants of the original Bitcoin. It doesn't really make sense to say that either is the original Bitcoin, because both have introduced changes. It also doesn't make sense to say that either isn't the original Bitcoin, because they both originate on the same blockchain. The idea you're trying to apply here, that a fork means a new coin was created and the old coin continues on, just doesn't really capture the full truth of situation.
Looking at popular opinion as if that had any relation to reality is not going to help you understand what's going on here. Most people don't understand Bitcoin, so looking at the opinions of most people as if there's any truth there is pointless.
How will the merchants in your world know which currency they're accepting?
Admittedly, that's beyond the technical ability of many people, but names don't solve this problem in any way. I can pull a copy of the BCH source code, find/replace every displayed text that says "Bitcoin Cash" with "Bitcoin" but that changes nothing about the currency being exchanged.
For instance, Satoshi told people something that all participants considered reasonable, and so the participants reacted accordingly. Systemic reasonable behavior is not inconsistent with the principle of decentralization, it's a consequence of it.
The origin of systemically-reasonable policy is orthogonal to the idea of decentralization, unless that origin is structurally mandated.
But I'm with you man, if we as a decentralized group come up with a reasonable hierarchy of trust supported by free speech and democracy, then we can create a systemically-reasonable Money that we can all agree is good.
Having some Eminence say "This is what we should do" and then having a wide network of people go and do that is _not_ a problem. What _is_ a problem is if some eminence says "This is what we should do" and having a bunch of other people say "I don't want to do that" or "That doesn't make sense" or "This will be bad for me" and then _having to do it anyway_. That's the issue. Having to get permission for the US Govt before you change how nodes work, that's an issue. Having some dev frown and say "I can't get the majority to adopt my pull request because of stupid Greg Maxwell" is not an issue.
No complex system involving humans will ever get around the importance of human communication and coordination and agreement, and that is not a technological problem to be solved. A system that artificially mandates who those humans should be, or what kinds of solutions they can offer, that _is_ a problem to be solved, and Bitcoin does a nice job of solving it as well as it can reasonably be solved.
Of course, this is an empirical question. I could be wrong, and the data will demonstrate that in time. But so far there is no such demonstration of wrongness, and the chaos and arguing between various factions (e.g., Segwit2x, Bitcoin Cash) are not evidence in favor of that hypothesis.
By validating the blocks against the rules you've chosen and choosing the longest valid blockchain.
> How will a merchant know which currencies to accept if they have no names?
By choosing the blockchain they agree with the rules of.
> When I'm trading Bitcoin for Litecoin, am I just trading the same thing for itself?
No, but the name isn't the important difference. The important difference is that Bitcoin proof of work uses SHA while Litecoin proof of work uses Scrypt, so the blocks of one don't validate under the rules of the other.
At the end of the day, when consensus breaks in unforeseen circumstances-- whether through a bug or an attack (the difference is purely syntactic)--people turn to the developers to tell them which consensus ruleset to follow. If you disagree with the developers, your chain gets called something else, as we've seen with Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum Classic.
With the 2013 Bitcoin fork, there were 2 ledgers and the network could not find consensus until the developers realized this and told everyone what to do 4 hours later. That's the developers controlling the system.
And who controls the developers? Their big bad State.