Author: Mike Hearn 2015-08-15 19:21:52
Published on: 2015-08-15T19:21:52+00:00
Bitcoin users who don't mine may wonder if they have a vote in protocol changes. In theory, the economic majority should always win, but in practice, it's difficult to measure what the economic majority wants. Defining the term precisely enough to put into an algorithm is tricky. For miners, expressing their vote is easy: they switch to a different full node implementation that gives them different blocks. For users, switching to a different wallet would express their vote. If their wallet is fully validating and the decision is implemented via hard fork, this is sufficient. However, if the wallet is not fully validating and cannot detect the fork point by itself, it would need help in the form of checkpointing. Voting via proof-of-stake might be useful as a form of opinion poll, but wallet developers would have to add support for such a protocol to their apps. The wallet market is decentralized, so it's possible that a coin voting protocol could one day happen.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T19:44:02.262833+00:00