Author: Milly Bitcoin 2015-06-28 20:10:58
Published on: 2015-06-28T20:10:58+00:00
The core maintainer of Bitcoin Core, Wladimir, does not have more power than any other person with commit privileges to the GitHub repository. There are seven people with commit privileges and five of them are active. Changes will have reached some level of technical consensus before they are merged. Even if Wladimir committed a change, it could be reverted by any of the others. Moreover, even assuming the Core Maintainer commits a change to Bitcoin Core that gets packaged up into the next code release, it still doesn't push a change to the bitcoin network. The individuals and companies running Bitcoin Core software have to choose to upgrade and developers that maintain alternative implementations would have to decide to merge those changes to the codebase they are independently maintaining.The official release of Bitcoin has significant power and control over the network. Any new developers hired by companies will do so because of their influence over the official release since that is the only incentive. It is significant power to have control over the official release at the present time. If they did not have significant power, people would not spend significant efforts lobbying them to make changes. However, it seems that this block size fork is only the beginning of the issues that will arise in the coming years. Whatever powers the core maintainers have, it is going to be exploited one way or another as time goes on. Maybe there are enough feedback mechanisms to protect against that, but it's difficult to predict.There is no known mechanism for safely deploying controversial changes to the consensus rules. The process we have is seeking consensus, and though our definition of "uncontroversial" is vague, it is quite obvious when a proposed change is not "uncontroversial" (like in the block size debate). The issue about the developers is the tremendous influence they have to veto any changes. With all the crying and moaning about centralization on this list, this could be a concern. The Bitcoin software development system is subject to attack from just a couple of people who have this veto power.Although the number of capable reviewers is quite small, if more companies hired and trained more developers to become bitcoin core developers that situation could change. Any changes to any part of the code go through the core maintainer who maintains control over the consensus rules. If they change the consensus rules, they are incompatible. Forking the project is just one click, but you cannot unilaterally change the consensus rules of a running p2p consensus system because you cannot force the current users to run any software they don't want to run.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T00:55:03.884257+00:00