I don't think bitcoin unlimited is a dictatorship. We have a constitution which sets a procedure for elections as well as a no vote of confidence. That makes it a constitutional democracy.
As for Jeff, he has publicly supported a blocksize increase since early on I believe. He may have kept his "enemies" closer perhaps to very effectively show their true intentions as he did by having even his minimal compromise of 2mb rejected. Thus starting what I think is the beginning of the end of the war.
However, we have no where near won. We have to persuade the whole ecosystem to upgrade to BU and that is a huge task. Any little fault and we fail and with our failure comes core dominance and with core dominance comes settlement nonsense.
I will be brutally honest, and I apologise for it in advance, but I want our project to succeed so I feel I have no choice. While
@theZerg actually stood up and coded BU for which he deserves huge respect, he himself says that he has "no prior Bitcoin software experience".
I think therefore Gavin was right to bring us down to earth as people may have used the software in trust of our recommendation. We are dealing with money here, with people's savings, some six billion dollars worth. We need to be absolutely certain that there is no unintentional bug or people lose their hard earned money as well as send bitcoin's reputation into the drain.
The situation we are in therefore means that, unfortunately, we have a moral imperative to warn individuals to not actually use the nodes because it has not been vigorously tested or peer reviewed and to only treat it as a protest vote at this point.
Obviously that is not in any way
@theZerg's fault. It is not his fault he doesn't have any prior bitcoin software experience, it is not his fault no developer reviewed his coded or made suggestions etc, it's not his fault others have not tested it and so in. To the contrary he actually deserves huge respect.
We do not know if these developers knew about the project though.
@cypherdoc for example stated somewhere to not "hit" Gavin with BU yet. Now they know and we very much hope they want to contribute and even take lead and perhaps we can even help by lobbying them.
Because, if this node is to be actually used and have any chance of replacing core thus making BU a runaway success, we need trusted known experts with years of experience who know how to lead an open source software project like BU who can test the code, review the code, foster trust and make sure that every one's money is absolutely safe.
Now people are using such terms as begg or whatever. I'd say lobby. I think we need to lobby Jeff and others to give us the experience and leadership we need to take this thing to the world stage and give the knock out punch and that is exactly what I personally am going to do because I do not care about egos or emotional baggage or anything like that.
Respect where due, of course, but what is right for the project, for bitcoin, and for us all as I see it has primacy for me over anything else. And I doubt that anyone can reasonably argue with the suggestion that what is right for the project right now is someone with actual experience of leading an open source project who intimately knows the code and it's many potential bugs.
