The stage is set for the

Fork-a-paloosa

that core devs warned about since 2013, and man, it's about time we finally get a chance to see them proven wrong with

actual empirical evidence

in an fork experiment that

Hume himself would approve of

. The most recent

fork-de-jour

is the

Bitcoin Gold

branch which promises a return to the "golden age" of GPU mining, which (so they claim) is more decentralized than current ASIC based mining. Of course, not many are fooled by this promise, as this is a perfect case of

decentralization maximalism

, which is a delusion that afflicts many newcomers to Bitcoin. Experienced bitcoiners know that decentralization is not an

ends

but a

means

.

The real goal of bitcoin is censorship resistance, and it achieves this via a mix of decentralized peer nodes, permission-less mining, and a negative economic feedback cost on those that would violate the network rules. And the most important of those variables is the last one which is what makes it hard for a very well (fiat) funded attacker to just 'take over' (with brute force and cash) the network by way of bribing all the prominent developers and buying up all the mining hash power. Bitcoin Gold, with their misguided idea of decentralization will just make a network that is more easily usurped by a millionaire who can source more graphic cards from Nvidia or ATI, or hackers who are better at embedding malware into everyone's computer so that they can take over the network via

botnet mining