The Bitcoin Foundation is lead by people who have a business interest to avoid upsetting the US authorities.
Not much of one. They have yet to apparently delay any noxious-to-US-authorities features or bugfixes, and Gavin’s past actions indicate he feels more beholden to the miners than the authorities (witness him giving away something like $70k to the people who contributed to the recent 0.8 blockchain fork).
Besides the absence of evidence that this is an issue, the Satoshi client can be forked easily, and refusing to incorporate a usable Zerocoin—which is something a lot of people want even if they don’t use SR—would be an excellent incentive to do so.
Not much of one. They have yet to apparently delay any noxious-to-US-authorities features or bugfixes, and Gavin’s past actions indicate he feels more beholden to the miners than the authorities
But the miners aren’t on the Bitcoin Foundation board. MtGox, BitInstant and CoinLab have their representatives on the board.
Gavin also acted under immense timepressure in the 0.8 fork case.
Not much of one. They have yet to apparently delay any noxious-to-US-authorities features or bugfixes, and Gavin’s past actions indicate he feels more beholden to the miners than the authorities (witness him giving away something like $70k to the people who contributed to the recent 0.8 blockchain fork).
Besides the absence of evidence that this is an issue, the Satoshi client can be forked easily, and refusing to incorporate a usable Zerocoin—which is something a lot of people want even if they don’t use SR—would be an excellent incentive to do so.
But the miners aren’t on the Bitcoin Foundation board. MtGox, BitInstant and CoinLab have their representatives on the board.
Gavin also acted under immense timepressure in the 0.8 fork case.
And yet.
His recompense was done afterwards, where he could repent at leisure; during the fork, of course, he was quite busy.