Author: ZmnSCPxj 2022-04-28 05:26:48
Published on: 2022-04-28T05:26:48+00:00
The issue of soft fork activation in Bitcoin raises questions about the threshold for saying "this consensus change is ready for activation" and whether it changes based on the nature of the consensus change and different constituencies. Ideally, 100% should be the threshold, but the real world smashes this ideal, and there is some threshold that is not 100% that is deemed acceptable. The Aumann Agreement Theorem states that "if two people are perfectly rational and start from the same information, they *will* agree", but democracy and consensus stem from the real-world flaws of this theorem. Democracy and consensus depend on assumptions that fix the flaws of the Aumann Agreement Theorem, such as the aggregation of goals, the availability of necessary information, and humans making an effort to be closer to the ideal perfect rationality. However, democracy itself has flaws in these assumptions, such as human rationality tending to correlate, limited brain space assigning importance to trivial things, and disparate goals and sub-goals resulting in an unfocused mess. Rather than increasingly complicated solutions, the issues with direct application of the Aumann Agreement Theorem could be addressed directly. This includes improving the thinking of typical humans discussing the topic, gathering all relevant information, and accurately laying out the goals of all humans discussing the topic. Of note is that democracy works as widespread agreement on a topic among more-rational-than-irrational humans is evidence that a purely rational computational entity would decide the same thing.
Updated on: 2023-06-15T19:43:54.399330+00:00