Author: Ryan Grant 2015-10-07 05:07:48
Published on: 2015-10-07T05:07:48+00:00
Bitcoin's participants can improve their ability to stay on a valuable and censorship-resistant blockchain by absorbing cultural wisdom regarding "rough consensus". The idea of rough consensus originated from one of the "founding beliefs" of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which believes in rejecting kings, presidents, and voting, and instead, using rough consensus and running code.To achieve rough consensus in the IETF, objections must be debated until most people are satisfied that these objections are wrong. Strong objections do not block rough consensus but are considered and addressed by the working group chair. Working group chairs have the responsibility of steering discussions towards productive interaction and declaring when rough consensus has been met.Consensus within the IETF doesn't require that everyone is happy and agrees that the chosen solution is the best one. Consensus is when everyone is sufficiently satisfied with the chosen solution, such that they no longer have specific objections to it. It's important to ask for reasons when someone objects to a proposal. Coming to consensus is when everyone comes to the conclusion that either the objections are valid, and therefore make a change to address the objection, or that the objection was not really a matter of importance.If this does not happen, rough consensus is achieved when all issues are addressed, but not necessarily accommodated. The chair of a working group who is about to find that there is only rough consensus is going to have to decide that not only has the working group taken the objection seriously, but that it has fully examined the ramifications of not making a change to accommodate it, and that the outcome does not constitute a failure to meet the technical requirements of the work. The person raising the issue should receive a reasoned explanation of why their concern is not going to be accommodated.Consensus-building is used as a tool to get to the best technical outcome when decisions are made. Voting leads to gaming of the system, "compromises" of the wrong sort as described earlier, important minority views being ignored, and worse technical outcomes. As long as the chair is looking for outstanding technical objections and not counting heads, vote stuffing shouldn't affect the outcome of the consensus call.Even if no particular person is still standing up for an issue, that doesn't mean an issue can be ignored. A substantive issue needs to be addressed before the chair can claim that rough consensus exists, even if the person raising the issue disappears. Rough consensus is a good defense against committing to decisions with subtle undesirable long-term effects.To learn more about forming useful rough consensus, one can refer to "The Tao of the IETF" and RFC 7282. While Bitcoin Core is not an IETF working group, its developers can still work on what they know and speak clearly enough to the economic majority to ensure that the system works.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T23:58:21.220914+00:00