Comment by arcaster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arcaster | Hacker News Reader

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After working in the space for about a year, after being a developer and enthusiast surrounding crypto since the early days of BTC this "bickering among core devs" is nothing new.

Any press or "talks" that say otherwise are either being influenced with serious bias or are simply reporting false information.

I like DLT tech, however, if bitcoin has shown us anything it's that once you solve the double-spend problem you're still left with an even more grotesque problem of governance.

People pick fun at ETH since it has a "single leader", but Vitalik is more of a back-seat conductor than a "grand leader". Also, most arguments of "bitcoin being a truly decentralized platform because our devs are decentralized" can easily be diffused by vaguely looking into how BlockStream operates...

The political shit-storm being paraded by BTC needs to end soon, we really don't need another 2-3 years of douchey BTC core devs arguing on the internet and bad-mouthing any project that isn't BTC.

The governance issue is, to me, the 'final boss' of Bitcoin. They way it's set up, Bitcoin should ruthlessly follow the will of the majority and generate new consensus. I cannot think of another system that could potentially do this as effectively.

It's ugly, bitter, and has real costs, but the way it's playing out gives me confidence that cryptocurrencies are truly a novel form of human communication about value.

Why would you want a financial system that follows the will of the majority? Financial systems are incredibly complex, and the majority is easily influenced by ideas that seem correct because they can be stated simply, though those ideas may actually have no hold over reality.

The whole point of bitcoin is that it is stable, trustworthy software. You don't have to worry about the latest fad screwing up your ability to use the financial system.

Democracy can easily be achieved with rigid protocols: just have multiple coins! (Bitcoin, ethereum, etc), and if you prefer one over the other, use the one you prefer. Then make a system that keeps them mostly interoperable (they already are, it's very easy to change funds between them), and viola! Nobody becomes victim to the will of the majority, while the majority can still pick between multiple options.

> Bitcoin should ruthlessly follow the will of the majority and generate new consensus.

This might be a dumb question, but the majority of what?

As I understand it, the majority of the hashing power. The trick is that hashing power alone can not dictate the network, else the users disappear and all that hashing power becomes worthless. So we have cryptografically reproduced a problem of governance present since the dawn of time.

It's ruthless because existing nation-state actors or other rich actors could invest in mining hardware to take control of the network.

Existing power structures (wealth & access to GPU) translates to power over BTC.

BTC governance is already "solved". The point is that there is no inherent governance. "Civil wars" and forks are by design, not a problem.

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