> No, that's incorrect. There is no fundamental trust; you were describing control in a coercive sense among the developers by directly asserting that developers have specific control over the funds in the system.

> This is obviously not true, has never been true, and I have no trouble predicting that it will never be true.

IANAL, especially considering the number of jurisdictions involved.

It seems totally possible to me that a BTC developer could be rubber-hose compelled by the legal system to publish a patch, just as they might compel a bank to refund someone's stolen funds. Governments sometimes protect from "compelled speech." But what if the speech is publishing "from=acct1 to=acct2 value=100" to a blockchain? How is that different from a banker being compelled to click a button in their own UI, thats value is the same thing?

Secondly, you are right that people would probably fork and not update if the developers became compromised... then the new developers would have the same thing happen to them and become compromised. As long as the developers aren't anonymous they will be a SPOF. (This is why my initial comment said KYC killed bitcoin - its entire premise fails when it is nonymous.)

Finally, cryptocurrencies as a whole are just BTC, ETH, and a bunch of nothing. Repeated forks of BTC because of legal drama, departing/jailed developers, will rapidly move the BTC forks into the nothing category. Without consensus on a path forward (to fork or not to fork) both sides of the network are diminished. It isn't even clear if Wright's goal is to get 4b, or just to destroy BTC far enough to collect the ashes.