On Friday, September 04, 2015 8:13:18 PM Andy Chase via bitcoin-dev wrote: > Who makes high-level Bitcoin decisions? Miners, client devs, merchants, or > users? Let's set up a system where everyone has a say and clear acceptance > can be reached.
For hardforks (removing consensus rules), economic consensus: people who accept payment in bitcoins weighted by their actual volume of such payments. A supermajority subset may arguably be sufficient for some hardforks (which don't violate Bitcoin's social contract) since they can effectively compel the remaining economy to comply. For softforks (adding consensus rules), a majority of miners: they can "51% attack" miners who don't go along with it. Anything else does not necessarily need universal agreement, so are completely up to the whim of individual software projects. If someone doesn't like a decision in Core (for example), they can safely fork the code. If any significant amount of people use their fork, then the BIP is accepted whether or not Core later adopts it. Note this "system" is really describing a lack of a system - that is, what naturally must happen for changes to occur. Softforks have a relatively mature technical method for measuring support and deploying (which I believe someone else is already working on a BIP describing), but the same thing is impractical for hardforks. Some formal way to measure actual economic acceptance seems like a good idea to study, but it needs to be reasonably accurate so as to not change the outcome from its natural/necessary result. Luke _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
