Be angry. If not, this will become a take-over.
I disagree. I think it should be "look for better governance. If not, this might become a take-over."
I see this as a crisis in BCH governance. Simply due to human nature of always disagreeing at some point. Sure, there might be incentives and conflicts of interests in the background that I do not know about (though I think that's unlikely and at most I see egos clashing here at the moment). But that doesn't really change the fundamental problem.
BU member
@singularity wrote a draft of what I think makes most sense for a way to resolve these kinds of issues, and although I and likely everyone else who thinks the general idea is good could bikeshed this to death, I would actually like to express my support for him to make this some kind of BUIP which when passes would be floated to the miners, with explicit request for open feedback or adoption (potentially with changes from the miners) by them.
A few things make me optimistic that it won't become that bad: Your anger (and visibly other people's anger on reddit
) and that, in general, people here have been burned already with BTC and remember that. On top of that, our comms channels are in
much better shape.
Now, What I think you want to look out for are signs that this crisis in governance is used to attempt a hostile takeover again:
I
think that point is reached when members of any particular project (such as ABC with its dominance right now, but essentially that goes for BU as well) start to stall on or being noticeably unwilling to address the underlying issue of governance in a way that would pave a way forward to conflict resolution.
That is when one should start to really worry, IMO.
So, yeah. I think that this is going to happen was actually predictable, some have put more effort into addressing this than others (
@singularity) but I urge all to think about abstracting a bit from the actual situation to the more general issue of conflict resolution.
I personally do not see anything but hash power voting resolving this, but I am all ears to other answers that aren't extreme consensus or something
Hash power resolves it in the end anyways, but I think it makes a lot of sense to structure any governance around this 'fundamental law of blockchain nature' - to avoid fiascos like the BCH/BTC split from occuring again. I think if
@singularity works on a BUIP, he should make clear that his proposal isn't a
change in governance as much as it as a gentlemen agreement between miners to express their governance in this way - which would also foster communication about proposals and make them more like an open vote contest.
@freetrader : Good points.
@hodl: A way to make miners and the community care would be for all devs to agree to go forward with exactly one HF - and that all current clients have to stop operating right at the HF.
If that HF is then hashpower voted (or better: features of it are), there's going to be a lot of stake in deciding on the right choice. I am not 100% sure this is going to be necessary or the best way to solve this, but there are ways.
It is my optimistic hope and expectation that attempts to subvert any agreed-upon process will be much more visible and much less likely to succeed with an informed BCH public and more diverse communication channels.
Even if not, I think it is strictly better than the alternatives: The governance process
might fail. Not trying means failing right from the start.
And there is and always will be the option for a group of people to start their own fork!
