I still don’t get it. Governance is hard enough as-is. Why would you want to make it deliberately worse?
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2/ If you’re talking about ossifying the protocol, that’s a different question. Agreed with
@byrongibson that at some point the protocol will get exponentially harder to change, once enough layers & vested interests have been built on top. -
3/ This will happen to any blockchain with significant mass adoption.
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4/ You can of course ignore the ossified protocol & keep adding your own stuff to it. But likely no one would want to use your custom protocol.
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5/ Just look at how hard it is to upgrade the Internet Protocol. Many years ago, I worked for a telecom company & personally witnessed how painfully slow carriers move in terms of adopting IPv6- despite everyone knowing how much better IPv6 is.
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6/ RE: Governance, if the protocol gets ossified, there’s less of a need for governance or BIP process. So in some sense, we *want* to ossify quickly, in order to avoid the governance mess. An ossified protocol is like Gold: it has fixed properties. No one can mess with it.
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7/ Governance, then, is more important during the development of a protocol. In this regard, we can let different blockchains experiment with different governance processes, and let them duke it out.
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8/ I’m of the opinion that BIP/OSS process is already adequate. When it comes to building infrastructure software, you want the most qualified people to make the decisions. It shouldn’t be a democracy.
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9/ Regular users don’t understand the nuances of technical parameters like block size, as
@NickSzabo4 pointed out. In that sense, letting “users”/“miners” vote in the BIP process is not a good idea, because you’re assuming these parties are qualified to make technical decisions. -
10/ Keep in mind, miners can already send technical people to represent themselves in the BIP process. So could a party like Coinbase. No one is stopping them from participating.
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11/ If you are technically competent, you can contribute. Period. No need to distinguish devs vs. users vs. miners vs. exchanges. Think about it, how would you know a dev is not already working for a miner?
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12/ TL;DR: Blockchain governance should be a question of expertise, not democracy.
End of conversation
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From painful experience, people use "immutable" to refer to a variety of things. Immutability of the ledger is guaranteed cryptographically, and so is frequently taken for granted. More often when people argue about immutability they're talking about not changing the rules.
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That's not my experience - people usually use it as an ill-chosen synonym for the tamper-resistance of the information stored on blockchains.
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Right, but the information they have in mind is things like balances and state, not the ledger. A hard fork can affect balances without touching the ledger.
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"Immutability" can't really be used in the same context btwn Ethereum and Bitcoin, because in BTC state *is* the tx ledger, whereas with ETH it's separate. ETH can follow the letter of the law (immutability) while violating the spirit of the law.https://twitter.com/nicksdjohnson/status/933233147185053697 …
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Bitcoin could do the same - with a hard fork that invalidates certain UTXOs, or inserts transactions that don’t require signature validation, for instance.
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right, but invalidating UTXOs or inserting invalid tx's would be reversing tx's and tampering with the ledger, which violates "immutability". ETH can claim it never reversed any transactions with a straight face because it tampered with the state, not the ledger.
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If you told an accountant that you had directly tampered with the balances, they would certainly conclude that you had tampered with the ledger. That's how people who work with ledgers use the terms, or at least used them before Ethereum.
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yes - my thoughts exactly!
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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