Considering the "who" was major bitcoin developers and pool operators, yes. #bitcoin-dev currently has 462 nicks and there were probably more during 2013 due to the crazy price increase. Keep in mind that a ton of communication happens on IRC and even bitcoin itself utilized IRC for finding other nodes to connect to.
Yeah, while I agree that the 2013 fork could have resulted in significantly more lost money than it did, I'm far from convinced that it would have proved catastrophic for Bitcoin. For one thing, the idea that a Bitcoin fork would be likely to endure for anything other than ideological reasons is pretty far-fetched. There are strong incentives for miners to be on the same side of a fork as the economic majority, and vice versa.
Now, in the case of a major ideological disagreement, as this block size debate has (suprisingly) turned into, I could see a lasting fork happening to the Bitcoin ecosystem. But back in 2013, there were no such major disagreements, just a bunch of minor squabbles.
So yes, it could have been worse, but not that much worse.
What damage do you think would've happened? I am honestly confused as to why people are so afraid of a fork.
If there is a fork, it just means that people have to decide which branch they believe in. They might even get different names. If you have coins on both forks, you can spend both coins.
In practice, the total market cap of the two forks should approximate the market cap of the original, which means your coins didn't lose any value. And in practice, whichever fork has more mindshare will probably win, not because of any technical reason, but because that's the one people are paying attention to so that's the one that seems safer to mine on.
Heck, if there really were a long-lived fork, people could just require people who want to spend pre-fork coins to send the coins on both forks before they consider the bill "paid".
How bad exactly do you think it could've gotten, in the worst case scenario? To me, the beauty of Bitcoin is that the worst case scenario just isn't that bad.
Decentralized decision making doesn't mean that decisions occur in some sort of abstract, Platonic "decentralized space" in which ideas spring into being from the ether and just sort of magically percolate into people's mind. It means there is no central authority with the capacity to use one or another variety of force to enforce their decisions. If a dozen people with no enforceable authority over each other look at a problem, discuss amongst themselves (even if there is an informal, unenforced hierarchy), come to similar conclusions, and agree to take coordinated action with no enforcement, it's still a decentralized decision.
There was no central authority here. Not even BTC Guild, because nobody had the power to force them to do what they did. They did it for their own reasons.
This is not a demonstration of how centralization saved the day; this is a demonstration that the decentralized BitCoin network still responded rapidly and solved a major problem, without having to fall back to some sort of centralization.
Decentralized networks still develop structure, usually with some sort of power law appearing. They just don't form one single central node that defines the very network, upon which the network lives or dies, and the dominant nodes can and often do shift and flow over time. BitCoin has been repeatedly resilient against even very large nodes in their graph dying.
(And I say this as a repeated and continuing BitCoin skeptic, not a cheerleader. This sort of decentralized rapid response isn't even particularly unusual; the Internet itself faces this sort of crisis fairly routinely and solves the problems without a single centralized authority dictating solutions to everybody else. "Rough consensus and running code" is another similarly-decentralized credo that has built a lot of things.)
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 24.7 ms ] threadPool operators, kinda like banks, or exchanges? There's just a little irony there.
There's no irony.
Now, in the case of a major ideological disagreement, as this block size debate has (suprisingly) turned into, I could see a lasting fork happening to the Bitcoin ecosystem. But back in 2013, there were no such major disagreements, just a bunch of minor squabbles.
So yes, it could have been worse, but not that much worse.
If there is a fork, it just means that people have to decide which branch they believe in. They might even get different names. If you have coins on both forks, you can spend both coins.
In practice, the total market cap of the two forks should approximate the market cap of the original, which means your coins didn't lose any value. And in practice, whichever fork has more mindshare will probably win, not because of any technical reason, but because that's the one people are paying attention to so that's the one that seems safer to mine on.
Heck, if there really were a long-lived fork, people could just require people who want to spend pre-fork coins to send the coins on both forks before they consider the bill "paid".
How bad exactly do you think it could've gotten, in the worst case scenario? To me, the beauty of Bitcoin is that the worst case scenario just isn't that bad.
There was no central authority here. Not even BTC Guild, because nobody had the power to force them to do what they did. They did it for their own reasons.
This is not a demonstration of how centralization saved the day; this is a demonstration that the decentralized BitCoin network still responded rapidly and solved a major problem, without having to fall back to some sort of centralization.
Decentralized networks still develop structure, usually with some sort of power law appearing. They just don't form one single central node that defines the very network, upon which the network lives or dies, and the dominant nodes can and often do shift and flow over time. BitCoin has been repeatedly resilient against even very large nodes in their graph dying.
(And I say this as a repeated and continuing BitCoin skeptic, not a cheerleader. This sort of decentralized rapid response isn't even particularly unusual; the Internet itself faces this sort of crisis fairly routinely and solves the problems without a single centralized authority dictating solutions to everybody else. "Rough consensus and running code" is another similarly-decentralized credo that has built a lot of things.)