Topic: BTC Governing Body (Read 862 times)

What exactly is consensus? Does that mean 100% agreement, a simple majority? Some other percentage?

Bitcoin was not the first. And most of other coins are not fork from Bitcoin.
Bitcoin was the first decentralized cryptocurrency that was, until today, impossible to double spend and use Proof of work.

This is why Bitcoin has no governing body. Nobody controls.

Some people tried running what was called the Bitcoin Foundation, which was merely an advocacy and educational group.  They had no official powers or authority, but they couldn't even manage that without corruption and scandal.  If nothing else, it was an apt demonstration of the shortcomings of centralised hierarchical bodies.  There's no way there could be a Bitcoin governing body without it being an even more spectacular failure.

Nobody would be stupid enough to sit on a bitcoin 'governing body'.

They would be locked-up by [insert any coercive government here], they would be on a no-fly list, probably spied on by half the worlds intelligence services, find themselves in a courtroom, or be charged with contempt of court from a far.

1.   programmers or individual miners manage their own fork
2.   nobody gives permission for frok
3.   Bitcoin is controlled by all Bitcoin users around the world.

thanks

Answers to first two questions are "Anyone who feel like it". Since BTC is open source anybody who is capable to gather support of significant group of users can do it.

As soon as one entity had control over those, what's to stop them doing something malicious or abusing that control for their own gain?  What oversight would there be and who would be in charge of that?  Who could be trusted with such a responsibility and how would that control be transferred if something were to happen to them?  As soon as legal ownership is involved, so are the lawyers and who is paying for those?  There are just too many hurdles to overcome for that to be considered in any way practical.  No individual entity should have control over those.

There is no centralized authority that exercises control over Bitcoin.  That's one of the best parts of the currency.

At the same time, I must say, I do wish some entity had control over the Bitcoin name as a trademark and the logo.  Anyone can fork the code at any time.  I could fork today and make Bencoin, either by starting a new blockchain from scratch or forking the blockchain (like the Bcash), which results in anyone that has BTC now having BEN (no, I'm not really going to do this).  Many altcoins have done exactly this.  The vast majority of them are forks of one or another of the major codebases.  However, much more troublesome, is that someone could fork the code and continue to refer to their fork as "Bitcoin".  It's bad enough with the Bcash, Bgold, etc.  Think of what a coin that held the exact same name would cause in terms of confusion.

I do think that some entity should seek control of their name and logos to try to eliminate that problem in the future.

I also believe that there needs to be standardization among the currency identifiers (BTC, ETH, XMR, etc.).  There is an ISO standard for country based currencies, I believe a standard should be created for cryptocurrencies.  There are differences between exchanges and these have caused problems for people.  These "little things", in my view, hold back wider adoption because of confusion.  I've also seen them used as potential weapons (during the S2X drama, there was talk of some entities referring to S2X AS BTC on their platforms.)  I believe there should be a neutral party that administers these identifiers, similar to how ICANN/IANA and the RIRs issue identifiers for the Internet, such as ASNs, RFCs, PENs, and TLDs.

This is your answer OP. Open source is community driven, anyone can fork the code and setup their own altcoins.

No one could govern bitcoin, ever.
Bitcoin is an open source so probably everyone could copy, edit, and modify it to make their own cryptocoin.
No one is giving them a permission since it was all free to make and they can update their own cryptocoin.
Honestly i don't know who maintained it but for sure he was an early adopter and most likely one of satoshi's friends.

That is the main reason why Bitcoin is the most valuable coin.

What is the correct value of new copies of bitcoin, if there can be unlimitedly many new coins.

There can be only one First real cryptocoin

BTC doesn't has any governing body and that's what makes it special. Its a P2P network so it is governed by two people who are doing transaction. However the core miners do have some impact on BTC.
1. Independent Miners and programmers handle their own respective forks.
2. No one gives any permission for a fork. Its the majority decision which works here. For instance if I bring a fork its the wish of the community to accept it or not.
3. Maintainence of bitcoin.org is currently being done by Will Binns.

The peer nodes are the governing body because "the blockchain" is defined as the blocks accepted by peer nodes. There are only two choices available to each peer node: reach consensus with all other nodes, or fork away and form a separate blockchain. If a group of nodes fork away together, we call this a "hard fork" or "forked blockchain" but forks occur occasionally in ordinary operation when a subset of nodes choose one block while the mining nodes choose another block. This ambiguity is quickly resolved once the miners have mined enough blocks that the peer nodes can reach consensus on which chain has the most proof-of-work.

Peer nodes choose which client to run. Right now, the reference client is Bitcoin Core but the Bitcoin protocol is open-source so it is available for anybody to write a conforming client to work alongside Bitcoin Core. As long as this client conformed to the rules of the Bitcoin protocol, it could coexist peacefully with Bitcoin Core. So, the protocol is what matters more than the client. The peer nodes are the ones who decide what the Bitcoin protocol is, and they do this by the version of Bitcoin Core they choose to run. For example, the latest updates to Bitcoin Core included a feature called "SegWit" or "segregated witnesses" that enabled more transaction throughput and some other features. But not all peer nodes have updated to this version of Bitcoin Core. This illustrates how you can have "gradual consensus" on the protocol, even while maintaining hard consensus on the blockchain.

1)Those miners and developers are handling the forks who are willing to bring some changes or modifications in the network.
2)No one gives permission for the forks, everyone is free to propose for the changes and the community/users and miners decides either they need it or not.
3) This one is accurate

Bitcoin is open source software using the MIT license, so basically, MIT license is a software license that allows a user to deal with the Software without restriction. So everyone has a right to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute.

As stated on the website
https://bitcoin.org/en/about-us

No one has to give permission for forks. That is the advantage of bitcoin: people are free to use it as they wish.  Consequently, anyone who wants to “handl[e] forks” can do so.  

“Governing body” makes little sense. The protocol and nodes that enforce the protocol governs bitcoin.

You can fork your rddsd7-coin from btc blockchain whenever you wan't. Probably it won't have any value, but you can do it.

Since bitcoin is open source, pretty much everyone can make their own fork and copy bitcoins code.

is that not the same question while building a web of trust model ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust

As many documents/references said there is no governing body for BTC. Then,
1. who is handling forks??
2. who is giving permission for forks??
3. who is maintaining bitcoin.org ??