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> There is absolutely nothing preventing people from taking the open-source code and creating an alternative "Bittoken" currency which changes problematic design elements such as the minting/issuance model.

Yes there is. The protocol is not documented at all. That's one of the reason I'm a little hesitant to touch it.

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What's wrong with the protocol documentation on the wiki?

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_specification

Try implementing that!

Is there anything in the specification that's you think is ambiguous or hard to understand?

There's also the source code to bitcoinj, which is a very well-commented implementation of the protocol.

Ok, my question was really as to how they even discover each other but some more perusing of that site shows that they connect to a IRC channel.

I thought there was no centralized point-of-failure?

The IRC channel just provides an initial set of peers. There's a hard-coded list of peers it falls back on if the IRC channel fails. I believe there's been some discussion about diversifying the initial peer discovery further.

What? There are already multiple independent implementations...

There are, but they are derived from the official client if I understand correctly.

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