“A row that broke out online this month has raised an important question about bitcoin: should people be allowed to code their own rules, and even opinions, into their own versions of the software that runs the network?
The debate kicked off among users of Gentoo – a variant of the Linux operating system that prides itself on being highly configurable to suit different user requirements – when a user reported an issue on the Gentoo bug forum on 5th October.
The version of bitcoind (the official reference client for interacting with the bitcoin network) distributed with Gentoo was blocking particular bitcoin addresses, said the report, meaning that transactions with them wouldn’t work.
The posting showed Gentoo output blocking a transaction with a SatoshiDice address, which had been blacklisted.”
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