Except, govt is the one enforcing use of its currency, while Bitcoin Foundation is a just a club of enthusiasts like you or me. They have no special power over Bitcoin. (Except, Gavin has private key to alerts in BitcoinQT, but this does not affect me and my transactions in the slightest.)
Interesting. From my point of view Bitcoin - is an agreement on protocol. We trust the idea and protocol to be secure.
What if someone changes this protocol and you won't be happy with these changes (and you can't control these changes now) - does it mean you were enforced to use it?
Someone can "change" the protocol only for himself. Like you can code up a web browser with a different version of HTML, lets say HTML++. If you find a couple of guys who will serve you webpages in HTML++, good for you, but this does not affect me, or the next guy who still use good old HTML.
Bitcoin Foundation or some well-known economist or developer may be put out some reasons for some change and convince people to upgrade to new rules. But the ultimate decision is in hands of every individual user: miner, merchant or a regular consumer.
No. If all miners start mining their own fork (e.g. creating 250 BTC in a block instead of 25 BTC), users' wallets will reject such blocks. Some other miners will pop up to continue mining the blockchain under previously agreed upon rules.
Miners can't just go and change the protocol. They risk that non-miners won't accept new blocks, so if they are going to enforce different rules, they need to make sure that everyone (not only other miners) will be okay with that.
Of course, some people can upgrade blindly. But if in the middle of transition it turns out that some people are worse off, everyone will rush back to avoid wasting resources on blocks that are not 100% accepted.
Well, you don't regularly see contentious protocol changes. I agree that miners are mostly following the technical leadership, I'm not sure it is 100 years true.
