Nick Szabo  🔑

the same applies in spades to "crypto currencies" which have such boards, as they have the additional problem of not having experience, failing to conflict of interests. there is some irony in that the genesis block quote used by satoshi of the chancellor of the exchequer quoted

as "being on the brink of 2nd bailout for banks" which for context came after protracted political debate in the public sphere with the governor of the bank of england warning about moral hazard, ie politics overriding prudent financial action to not reallocate risk to the public

so i think mislabelling tech improvements "governance" sets a very wrong expectation, of groups of humans in positions of authority deciding. there is no deciding there is just opt-in, backwards-compatible bitcoinium metallurgy improvements, which people adopt by consensus.

yes so that less common meaning of an simple mechanical device governor is probably better typified as something else, like laws of mathematics: validated as correct due to the mathematics and not changeable by central force without automatically creating a fork.

Sure cryptography ensures the validity of the contents of any block. I am talking about the meta process whereby those rules have been changed. That process has no formal governor even in the mechanical process control sense. As a result, it falls to a small group as I mentioned.

The meta is immutability but tech optimization & improvement. Governance is the wrong word: it invites intuition from centuries of hierarchical cultural training that everything is up for debate, changeable if expedient, or if a special interest can assemble enough lobbying clout

Bitcoin prevents a powerful elite, and populist supermajority from forcing change even if they rouse populist opinion against a minority, or are convinced they are "right". Bitcoin has individual veto to change, each user has to decide to opt-in to backwards compatible change.