Author: Hector Chu 2015-08-04 09:29:54
Published on: 2015-08-04T09:29:54+00:00
In August 2015, a debate began on the Bitcoin-dev mailing list about how to make changes to Bitcoin's consensus rules. Pieter Wuille argued that Bitcoin's consensus rules are a consensus system, not a democracy, and suggested that if people want a majority to decide on a currency's economic policy, they should use fiat currencies, which have their economic policy dictated by the government or relevant central bank committee without consulting ordinary users of the banking system. Wuille went on to say that those who disagree with the consensus rules will cease using the system, possibly moving to a different one like Bitcoin XT, leaving those on the old system with a solution that they all can agree on.Meanwhile, jl2012 proposed wrapping up the debate with voting by different stakeholder groups and provided concrete proposals for candidate proposals and voter groups. The proposal stated that candidate proposals must be complete BIPs with reference implementation that are ready to merge immediately; they must first go through the usual peer review process and get approved by the developers in a technical standpoint, without political or philosophical considerations. Any fine-tune of a candidate proposal may not become an independent candidate unless it introduces some “real” difference. “No change” is also one of the voting options. The proposal also included several voter groups, including miners, bitcoin holders, developers, exchanges, merchants and service providers, and full nodes operators. Each group would cast their vote differently, and single transferable vote was applied. After the most popular candidate was determined, the whole counting process was repeated by eliminating this candidate, which would find the approval rate for the second most popular candidate. The process would repeat until all proposals were ranked with the approval rate calculated. The proposal also addressed technical issues, such as voting by miners, developers, exchanges, and merchants being the easiest and needing a trusted person to verify voters' identity by email, website, or digital signature. For full nodes, a trusted person would set up a website as an interface to vote, and the votes with IP addresses would be published. For bitcoin holders, the workload could be very high, and an automatic system may be needed to collect and count the votes. Double voting was not allowed, and people were not allowed to change their mind after voting. The proposal also allowed people to have multiple roles in the Bitcoin ecology and vote in all applicable categories since they were contributing more than other people.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T18:14:49.263621+00:00