I don't think it's realistic, but what they mean is that the community can in theory get together and decide to fork the code, collectively deciding that BlackRock's Bitcoin addresses are no longer part of their Bitcoin network. The BlackRock Bitcoin would be incompatible with the forked code. The result of a fork like that is two coins: BlackRock Bitcoin and Everyone Else Bitcoin. Every holder of the original Bitcoin gets an equal amount of both. It's a popularity contest between the two resulting Bitcoins to determine the price of each. In 2017, Bitcoin was struggling to scale. It had absurd transaction fees due to demand (just like Ethereum a few years later), and the community couldn't come to a consensus on how to upgrade it. 10% of the community forked the code to upgrade it by increasing block size, while everyone else opted for an L2 scaling solution. The result for holders was that they ended up with both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash in their wallets. Weirdly, the combined market value ended up being higher than value of the Bitcoin before the fork. I sold my Bitcoin Cash immediately and pocketed the money, expecting the price to go to zero. It did not.

Saying 'don't downvote' is the flammable inflammable conundrum, both don't and do parse as do.

$ ls space?

I was pretty lucky in university as most of my profs were either using cross platform stuff or Linux exclusive software. I had a single class that wanted me using windows stuff and I just dropped that one. Awesome that you're getting back into it, it's definitely the best it's ever been (and you're right that Steam cracked the code). It sounds like you probably know what you're doing if you're running Linux VMs and stuff, but feel free to shoot me a PM if you run into any questions or issues I might be able to point you in the right direction for.

Worked with the US federal government for much of my professional career, mostly in an adversarial role. "reliable federal data sources" do not exist

IMO it was already shitty.

I expect them to give shareholders and directors a haircut before laying off workers, yes. But we know Microsoft never does that, so they can go f themselves.