Author: Milly Bitcoin 2015-06-18 12:38:30
Published on: 2015-06-18T12:38:30+00:00
The lack of a clear process or method for making changes to Bitcoin software development has been noted as a major issue. The response to questioning this has typically been evasive and there is no actual process in place. To encourage companies to adopt Bitcoin, there needs to be some type of process spelled out that can give these entities at least minimal assurance that there is some type of process in place. The current process is haphazard and disorganised, with people posting random tweets, Reddit posts, and blog posts. All this drama makes Bitcoin appear somewhat amateurish and rather risky. A "risk study" was done by the Bitcoin Foundation but that was only the first baby step in the process. There is no systems engineering process in place to make changes.Decentralisation of the state of the ledger by mining/nodes cannot be conflated with decentralisation of open source software by forking the software, as they are very different problems. Achieving the same level of decentralisation for both things is not possible or even desirable. In any case "decentralization" for the state of the blockchain is only an approximation anyway since there are things like 51% attacks and checkpoints.Bitcoin Core is completely different from other open source projects, particularly when it comes to consensus. While there is lots of decision-making ability for code changes, consensus changes are much more difficult. Even relatively straightforward softforks come with a long discussion process, and a hardfork is hard to do at the best of times, and simply not possible if almost the entire technical community disagrees with you. Bitcoin is supposed to be a robust, global, decentralised network beyond anyone's control, and it makes no sense to try to run it as a dictatorship. Anything that is controversial needs to be considered carefully.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T23:26:53.213510+00:00