Doesn't this point to Bitcoin's decentralized nature being largely smoke and mirrors?
You're claiming that just two individuals have had a significant negative impact on a project that was intended to be free from central control. That in itself seems like a failure of the project's goals.
They didn't just control the repo, but they somehow managed to convince the miners to support them. Exchanges and users simply defaulted to "the longest chain is Bitcoin", ensuring their victory. So they weren't alone.
But Bitcoin's truly decentralized nature allows for forks, where if you disagree with the development direction you can always go your own way. So the spirit of Bitcoin lives on in other projects (both via forks and via projects with no shared history with Bitcoin).
> You're claiming that just two individuals have had a significant negative impact on a project that was intended to be free from central control. That in itself seems like a failure of the project's goals.
Yes, it was (and is) still a major failure of the project's goals.
Similarly bitcoin is decentralized in that “anyone can fork it” but reality is without backing from major players, that will never gain any traction at all.
So no, functionally it is nothing approaching decentralized.
At the crucial point they did however convince the miners to support a Segwit + blocksize increase, which pulled away the support.
Of course, it's obvious that it was just a bait-and-switch and the blocksize increase is nowhere to be seen, and will probably never happen.
Ultimately, miners would only support a hard fork if a super majority went along with it and with the major forums being censored that was going to be impossible.
Without the censorship there would have been a super majority supporting the hard work given the sentiment on the forums at that time.
Blockstream was able to create the perception of an economic majority — thanks to forums like Bitcointalk and Reddit (moderated by one guy: Theymos / Michael Marquant).
In reality, a lot of people didn’t support blockstream, but through censorship and permanent bans, a few people were able to create the perception of economic majority.
Also in the end it doesn't matter what is in the Bitcoin Core github. It's a network and you can run any variant you want. Bitcoin Cash tried and failed, because in the end it is not what the users, the node operators, chose to adopt.
I believe most people call this bcash.
And those who are clueless and just follow the hivemind.
It still lives on as an uncensored subreddit where all forks of Bitcoin may be discussed.
And focusing so much on a subreddit that's not tied to the project no more than r/bitcoin is to Bitcoin, while dismissing it's existential reason as "irrelevant", is tiring.
Only counting "everybody" as people on your side is common in cults, but is rarely indicative of the real world.
From day one Satoshi had a road map to scale BTC to Visa-like levels while keeping TX fees around a penny. Just incrementally increase the block size over time.
Soon after Blockstream's Greg Maxwell and Adam Back hijacked the Bitcoin Core GitHub repo they locked down the block size to 1mb, something Satoshi and the original devs never imagined anyone being dumb enough to do let alone intended.
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) stayed with the road map and has worked great with low fees for over a decade now. BTC twisted itself into a digital ponzi scheme for morons.