@Adam - here is something that might be like an example of my "blogging" - i wonder if this is worthy of being published later, after some work.
I am really just happy to be in this thread, getting notifications. If the topic of the thread is about censorship - it drifted more into the specifics of the proposed fork BitcoinXT and less into the censorship of that "alternate" offering.
The reddit thread and the other big forum bitcointalk both seemed to be moderated or administrated by one (or more - but very few) people who thought the best response was to quell discussion of BitcoinXT. This was censorship and they might not have realized that immediately. Censorship is completely allowed in forums - they always have some kind of "rulebook" you agree to and if you don't fit in you may get kicked. Forums aren't part of some law of free speech - they are private to some extent. In fact most of the world is - so free speech is an absolute you just can't find in this relative world. That i guess is similar to the way media is told just not to talk about what is "approved for discussion" on the political front. So here, it is open to discussion, and its good that as bitcoin user base grows the number of community chat and forum islands of information spread too.
For so long when I was that searching the internet servers I kept ending up in reddit or bitcointalk. I did join another infamous forum for about 1 year - "hashtalk" and the famous antics of its owners and cloudmining (ponzimining perhaps is a good term to coin) and their "paycoin launch". That was a heavily censored place - and i would bounce over to Bitcointalk to a thread called "hashlets always stay profitable" or something like that where they reverse engineered and eventually were proved correct - amongst the tasty bits of information were emotional attacks, trolling ... while over in "hashtalk" it was quite pleasant but also very much about keeping customers of GAWminers placated. The investors.
Now many of us feel invested in bitcoin financially. I have some, i'm quite poor so lucky for me its not a scary thing when the market moves.
Philosophically speaking people are projecting a lot of their own personal ideas onto bitcoin. Maybe they just "thought" those were some kind of official credo - or that this was a community philosophy. Bitcoin is agnostic and as i heard it described amoral. It isn't sentient, nor does it have a guiding organisation other than perhaps the core developers - but they are impermanent. It has already been through cycles of development but most people can see quite plainly it was a gift, offered up to benefit the world. Its creator(s) mined a lot of coin - I think people have checked and not found that this has been spent - i find that interesting. Philosophy is a big part of why bitcoin came into existence, that and problem solving.
Some time in the past I heard Gavin A. getting flamed for his comments that played down the significance of bitcoin. He was much less into sensationalism, marketing and people were aghast as he said he didn't care about the price of bitcoin and many other things. They thought Gavin needed media training - because i guess their thoughts were guided by what we know of the business, advertising world - how things are made into a success. Products - they come and go - a company that produces products has to keep making them, or upgrading them.
We the consumers of this world quite used to changes, upgrades, new versions and competing products. The conditioning of the market and the selling of products - and so i ask you this:
Was bitcoin created as a product? What defines it - does it need to be owned, sold for profit - is it own-able? I think bitcoin, being a protocol, design, scheme, programming environment, payment network and is a meta level beyond product. It is something that products have been built out of - the famous "killer apps" way of looking at it and bitcoin the currency is the first killer app built into what we call "bitcoin". Coloured coins, tokens, identity, facts that are stored to become immutable are other applications.
Some are declaring a coup d'etat is what bitcoinXT was about. That assumes Bitcoin has a government with legitimate and illegitimate officers, or that it is a company. Most facts point to it being something that can't be bottled into such descriptions. There was never any office of president, government - but we could say the development team existed to enrich bitcoin. To me they are part of the world around this organism - evolving bitcoin symbiotically - they are rewarded in one way or another interdependent interactions - maybe bitcoin as a term has to include it's support structure. Without the structure there is no bitcoin - its like software without a computer - the idea of software makes no sense, its gibberish unless it comes to life. Bitcoin is litterally feeding many people with its block creation rewards of newly minted/mined bitcoin. This organism has grown to a certain scale - some assume it is meant to just keep growing because the vision behind it was to serve "the world". Well, it has always served "a world" of it's user base. Motivations vary and if you are wise you know that it is motive that drives results - the same action with different motives yeilds completely different results in many cases. The motives aren't clear - they are obscured perhaps because this is a big change, not just one BIP but many are included in BitcoinXT and many aren't talked about.
Political observations tell me that perhaps it is all these extra features that were included in BitcoinXT because they would make it relevant to many groups. Would you make a fork and not put in more effort to ensure it would not leave you embarrassed and alone - non-adoption might be a painful result for Mike Hearn. Maybe big miners requested these and it is a bit like policy written into law for votes - a way of politically making a bill relevant enough to be able to become law. That is a long topic but if you know what i mean there is some smoke there and where there is smoke there is ... what? Not saying it is a bad fire. These adjustments, feature additions to bitcoin are surely all lovingly crafted pieces of source code aiming to improve and adapt bitcoin to perceived threats. Bitcoin has an immune system - and that is the way it mutates into improved forms of itself based on the environment - it does this conceptually through the minds of the users, core developers and interactions. So i am waxing on philosophically here because i want to defuse accusatory nature and honour the title of this forum thread. Why should talk be censored and what is your motivation if you think your viewpoint is more important such that you feel you have to talk down someone who might want to talk up BitcoinXT. How much are you swayed one way or another by your feelings about the personality of various players in this game.
One thing must be true - BitcoinXT is not only about blocksize - it is about many things. Blocksize is just one platform that these people are running the election on, a well known one. Other parts are perhaps referred to as "hidden" changes because of the way they are either ignored or less discussed. If you have a referendum it seems that it might be much easier if you can vote yes or no to a whole range of proposals and those could then be included or excluded. This is not a democratic election, this is a kind of "stakeholder" thing. Not by who owns the most bitcoin but those who work in development and who are mining, and then secondary links to the people who influence them. Programmers are influenced by vastly varied topics of discussion, miners are probably influenced by greed and bitcoin exchanges where they need to sell off to pay their bills. The P2P aspect of bitcoin doesn't have a fairness clause and P2P animals are still like aliens on this world. We can all benefit due to the open access and we have free internet to enable this Bitcoin application to run. It would be interesting to make a model or formula to understand the relationships that will predict if peoples choices meet their intended results. Most people want happiness but do everything they can to destroy their own happiness. You need to get down to some cold hard analysis and objectivity to figure this out - there is the weight of hashpower in the mining POW. There is weight of liquidity in the exchanges and there is weight of intellectual prowess and reputation in the software development team. All of these are also altered if the bitcoin software is altered - sometimes trying to bring more predictability does the opposite.
Look at "stablecoins" - in trying to be less volatile something like Paycoin was already doomed by the reality of market forces. Hashing power in the bitcoin network and it's distribution is also volatile, it settles into a balance based on economic factors. When the price of bitcoin is high everyone can turn on their miners everywhere for a time until so many get into it that it becomes unprofitable. The block halving does also lead to mining necessarily requiring higher costs for transactions, a higher value of bitcoin or less hashing power in the network. Those will all adjust until it makes sense - and i think this is why it is difficult to decide if bigger blocks also have some kind of maximum limit because they are a factor too. What i do think is that BitcoinXT will have tons of unexpected effects and bugs because it has so many changes - and I would like all the core developers to be able to contribute to solving that if we end up in a BitcoinXT world.
When these other factors are so difficult to predict then it is easier to start slinging mud and make it about human motivations - because we think we are better at understand those. Actually those are quite difficult to predict - and they are actually related to the economic factors in many ways themselves. Bitcoin, thought of as an organism, has enticed people into a relationship to pick its fruits. Now the DNA will be adjusted and its about understanding that this organism has been going through DNA changes and there is nothing sacred. Imagine if Bitcoin was worth thousands at the moment - people would really be that much more angry if there was any uncertainty affecting the market - maybe it is good that the price stay low until the whole thing is better understood.
