Quote from: Carlton Banks on October 18, 2016, 12:51:45 PM

But your picture is not accurate either. You cannot seriously compare the hard-forking mechanism as equivalent to a democratic system. It's an emergency feature, i.e BREAK CONSENSUS IN CASE OF EMERGENCY type of device. By telling people it's a democracy, you're encouraging the entitlement that lay-people should be making design decisions. They should not.

If Bitcoin development got infiltrated by crazies wanting to introduce ID tracking or permanent inflation, sure, break the glass and sound the alarm. And isn't it obvious that people trolling Bitcoin are always going to be claiming that it's time for the emergency split? Be careful what you wish for when promoting Bitcoin hard-forks as a democratic mechanism, that is an abuse of the system.

Your reply got me curious as to whether or not I had ever directly called Bitcoin a democracy or a democratic system. I do genuinely think of it as an open market because of the inherent weaknesses of democracy, and oligarchy, for that matter. Such centralised systems are entirely too prone to corruption. I trust the open market:

Quote from: DooMAD on January 21, 2016, 11:04:44 PM

At the risk of interrupting the crony-capitalist-circle-jerk here, it's not exactly a truly capitalist system if you resort to protectionism the moment a competitor threatens your bottom line. If you're so certain it's not a democracy and is, in fact, a free market, what are you so afraid of? Roll Eyes

And when some users said they wanted Bitcoin to work more like a democracy, I was pretty quick to point out the shortcomings of that:

Quote from: DooMAD on June 29, 2015, 11:29:47 AM

Quote from: SebastianJu on June 29, 2015, 11:06:58 AM

Though i would wish that the bitcoin blockchain and wallet development would work more like democracy. The head developer should agree to what the users want and implement that.

Eew, really? We can do so much better than democracy in its present guise. The leader of a nation should in theory agree to do what the public want, but that's rarely the case. Democracy at the moment is where a bunch of wealthy individuals and companies fund the election campaigns to effectively buy the policies they like best. Everyone else gets to choose the bought puppet they detest the least. It's just corruption by another name. I'd personally hate to see Bitcoin work more like that.

I did, however, say the opposite, in that democracy in the real world would work better if it behaved more like crypto:

Quote from: DooMAD on August 17, 2015, 07:39:39 PM

Quote from: RawDog on August 17, 2015, 07:08:50 PM

The real problem isn't XT. The real problem is that there is no good means to break a serious impasse.

XT is a tiny problem - many alternatives exist to get bitcoin to scale. But XT taught us one thing, Bitcoin is extremely fragile when the core devs can't naturally reach agreement in conversation.

It's not Bitcoin that's fragile per se, just the current prevailing, yet warped, concept of open-source that makes it appear so. The fact that Bitcoin is both open-source and a consensus mechanism means that anyone can not only read the code, but also alter it and make their own clients with their own custom rules to govern the network. However, these rules only come into being if enough users securing the network agree with them. This is more powerful than most people realise.

Anyone perceiving an alternate client with a fork proposal as a threat, or worse still, calling it an attempt at a coup or dictatorship, or thinking that all the core devs have to agree all the time has fundamentally misunderstood the concept of open-source decentralisation. Just because the majority of the users securing the network agree that Bitcoin Core is the correct rule set to govern the network at the moment, it does not mean that this will always be so. Being a developer for Bitcoin Core does not grant you any special power or authority over the network, nor should it.

The definition of "consensus" in Bitcoin is not a single group of developers agreeing on a rule and the network enforcing it without question. The true meaning of consensus is that any developer can propose a rule and the network chooses whether to enforce it or not. Ergo, Bitcoin is inherently resistant to authoritarianism. It would be incredibly difficult for a single developer to seize control or enforce rules that the majority disagree with. It's actually quite beautiful and I can't wait for the rest of the world to catch on. If politics and governance works in a similar fashion at some point in the future, we might have something that actually resembles the democracy we are supposedly meant to live in.

So yeah, I'm definitely not "telling people it's a democracy". If anything, I want what we still delude ourselves into calling "democracy" in the outside world to be more like Bitcoin.

Perhaps I'm just reading it the wrong way because you're effectively calling consensus itself an oligarchy. To me that just feels perverse. Undecided

There are no benevolent oligarchies. Sooner or later they'll be initiating transfer of wealth into their own pockets by fair means or foul. Just more corrupt centralisation by another name.