Quote from: VeritasSapere on September 10, 2016, 03:04:54 PM

"Consensus" is the name we have given the governance mechanism within Bitcoin. On the protocol level it is pretty straight forward, miners have the ability to vote through their hashing power, and miners have a strong game theory incentive to do what is best for Bitcoin since their profits rely on Bitcoins continued success. In this sense Bitcoin is governed by a simply majority rule. This is how decisions are supposed to be made, however because there is disagreement on this fact a lot of people can not even agree on how this governance is supposed to function creating a situation of great uncertainty. This creates confusion for the miners as well who are just following their economic self interest, which means that they are just following what they think is the overall sentiment of the networks participants.

In terms of governance this is where it starts to get more interesting. Unlike other majority rule systems, Bitcoin allows the minority to split off creating their own chain in the case that they do not agree with the changes that the majority is making. This fundamentally solves the age old problem of tyranny of the majority, in this sense I see blockchain as being the next evolution of governance, since it has solved this fundamental problem. Furthermore if the majority of users move to the minority chain after the split then the minority chain becomes the majority chain again, since miners will simply follow the chain which has the most value. In this sense it is not the miners that decide on the rules but it is ultimately the users who have this power, specifically the people who give the blockchain the most value. This is actually an ideal way to resolve disputes within Bitcoin, essentially allowing the market to decide.

I think that many people do not fully understand this mechanism and even fear it. When really what it allows is complete freedom of choice over what development path an individual supports. Some people think that Bitcoin is this unchanging thing, you might have heard the terms "immutability" and "code is law" thrown around. I perceive these blockchain systems very differently, it is not the case that we give up human governance to be governed by this unchanging machine code. The machine so to speak is actually a cyborg, it is part human and part machine. The protocol itself relies on human incentives to keep the network functioning, in other words we are all part of the machine and influence its behavior and rules. In this sense "Consensus" is a social mechanism, which just like other governance mechanism relies on the input of human beings for its continued operation. This I consider to be a good thing, some people have this utopian idea of blockchain being able to remove human beings from governance completely, thereby obsoleting politics. Unfortunately that is not how Bitcoin works and I have never seen a blockchain that can function in such a way.

Arguably this human element in governance is a good thing, since if we are building the systems of the future here, I do think it is good if we program Skynet to have a fork switch, just in case. Wink

Blockchain even a more potent technology, this innovation opens the opportunity is far greater than just cryptocurrency danger, Blockchain allows people who do not trust each other to interact with each other without being required as a neutral.