Topic: We Don't Want Democracy, We Want Consensus! - page 4. (Read 3222 times)

its silly to think someone would bother to vote if he didn't even bother to understand core concepts, if all this pointless Discussion on bitcointalk.org proves anything, it is that poeple understand the fundamentals pretty darn well...

are you crazy?

there is a government its called gavain

oh wait no, now its called a handful of devs all in disagreement.

are you crazy?
no democracy, no government that most of the people wants.

Consensus worked for bitcoin back when everyone knew how the system worked. I'm not sure it's possible now, when people don't even understand core concepts.

individual's opinion aren't as interesting as the opinion of everyone put together.
if 75% of poeple vote for 1 out of 3 seemingly equally valid BIPs you can bet your ass there is something special about that particular BIP.
if one person is making a lot of noise about his favored BIP it's not as convincing...

also lets consider whats we're seeing now miners are voting for BIP100 with a strong majority, BIP100 give miners more power so of course they will tend to vote for this option. probably BTC votes would not show such a strong majority favoring BIP100.

I think giving devs this information ( what minner want, what Investors want, what Large bitcoin entities want) is absolutely critical for them to make the "best" decision.

what is the best decision if not one which satisfies as many poeple in the different groups?

Keep calm ... and wait FIAT collapse. 

The "Central trusted authority", this is what the BTC Foundation was supposed to be. Most people don't want it anymore so we have to find how that new commanding group will be any different.

A good start to find a consensus would be to set a modest goal. Implementing changes one by one. Small steps by small steps.

Consensus is great if all the participants have the same general goal.

It is impossible if the participants have significantly different and incompatible goals.

In that situation, the best you're going to get with your proposal is either:

Democracy with exile:  Anyone that refuses to accept a compromise that the majority of participants find reasonable is simply accused of making "it clear that he does not believe in the Consensus Building Process and is doing nothing to help in it's success" and is therefore exiled from participating in the process at all.  The process repeats until all those that disagree with the majority have been exiled.  The remaining (non-exiled) participants therefore have 100% consensus.

Stagnation: Those with different goals than the majority can simply refuse to accept any "compromise".  They can furthermore continuously propose "compromises" that are unacceptable to the majority of the participants. The decision making process gets help up indefinitely, and changes that most sensible people feel are important and urgent don't get implemented.

I don't think that proposing such a contradictory process to bitcoin's concept is appealing and in general, positive. Why would this man look for a central authority to impose decisions rather than the network coming up to a consensus? That sounds a bit controlling for me.


Gavin was the lead dev before he left his post, but that doesn't mean that most of the technical issues and problems that bitcoin faced on the past were resolved only by the proposals of Gavin. It's like giving him all the credit while other developers spent and dedicated their time and effort to the project. This, I call, is BS.


Yes, there is no consensus building process that exists, but does this guy think that centralization would fix things and put things into its rightful and perfect state?

Agree. The best would be that the developers took consensus as a number one priority, not being rigid in their own ideas.

Mike Hearn has made it clear that he does not believe in the Consensus Building Process and is doing nothing to help in it's success. His suggestion seems to be to put in place a CENTRAL TRUSTED AUTHORITY who will make decisions for Bitcoin. To me, this goes against everything Bitcoin stands for and indicates that Hearn does not really understand the philosophy of consensus and decentralization that underlies Bitcoin.

www.seedsforchange.org.uk/consensus

The above site describes why democratic voting is inferior to a consensus based decision making model. With democratic voting you have winners and losers, with consensus everyone wins. There is compromise and all efforts are made to come up with the best decision that addresses everyone's concerns and everyone can live with.

With BIP69 miners voted with their coin base codes on every block they mined. Once 75% of votes in the past 1000 blocks were in support of BIP69 an alert was sent out suggesting that all miners, clients, wallets, etc switch to the BIP69 protocol or risk being left behind. Once 95% of the past 1000 blocks indicated support for BIP69 the new protocol was implemented and all blocks mined without the BIP69 update were rejected from that point on.

What is required for successful consensus decision making is a fluid flow of Proposals. The BIP should adapt to criticism and be amended to address critical concerns. Over time the "winner" will be the developer who was able to adapt his proposal to meet and address the concerns of everyone. 75% consensus results in an alert that the fork is about to occur and everyone should prepare. 95% the debate is over and the new BIP is implemented. Soon thereafter we should have 100% consensus.

This process can work and has worked in the past. We can tweak the percentages here and there, but what we require now is a CLEAR CONSENSUS BUILDING PROCESS, and Mike Hearn seems apposed to this. His suggestion is to insert a CENTRAL TRUSTED AUTHORITY, but I believe the Bitcoin Community can do better than that. I think we can make decisions in a DECENTRALIZED way and arrive at total agreement using the CONSENSUS DECISION MAKING PROCESS.

P.S. I am putting together a Open Letter to the Devs from The Bitcoin Community outlining an endorsement of any decision arrived at using the decentralized Consensus Decision Making Model. If you think you can help us write this letter please send me a PM.