This is a really good question, and one of the places where (imo) smart well-meaning people can and do disagree.
The general feeling seems to be: consensus forks would be so catastrophic to btc that we must focus everything on not having them happen, and concentrate development on one client.
The obvious rebuttal is that an ecosystem with only a single client is vulnerable as hell, and the opposite of resilient.
If btc gets to $100k and above, and larger parts of the world come to depend on it, I wonder if we'll see the attitudes around this change? It seems an under-discussed aspect of btc. (Perhaps under-discussed important things is this morning's unofficial theme.)
The thing is: there are multiple implementations and a lot of work goes into them, but still 99% if nodes run Core.
There isn't any rule that says everyone has to run Core and yet everyone does. I don't know that I see that changing.
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True. A lot of reasons for that, perhaps the biggest being how things are packaged, the same reason for LND's dominance.
I expect that the theoretical possibility of a multi-client world might be more important than the realized actuality of it.
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One sentiment I have heard around is: if you're going to have a bug, it's good if it's the same bug as 99% of the network.
It's funny though that something as decentralized as bitcoin hasn't figured out how to cultivate a significant user base for two or three main implementations.
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