Is There A Solution To Bitcoin’s Governance Problem – Part 1

What Is The Problem Behind Bitcoin And Regulation?

To specify the key aspect of bitcoin’s value proposition is that it comes as an open-source protocol independent of any particular corporation or government. The software that runs the Bitcoin network is similar to other open source initiatives managed and improved upon by a group of volunteer developers. The developers answer to Bitcoin users in theory who choose whether or not to run a particular version of the Bitcoin software. It is known that the majority of mining power, in reality, is that what drives the adoption of new versions of the Bitcoin software taking the approval mechanism out of the hands of Bitcoin users and putting into the hands of mining pools. 

Providing lose oversight over the developers, this Bitcoin development consensus mechanism ultimately has final control over what features they choose to add to the protocol. According to Bitcoin Chief Scientist, Gavin Andresen, when you go back in history it was really simple as whatever Satoshi decided at the beginning as they started with just one source code. Just one person was making all the decisions about what should Bitcoin be, how should it evolve, as well as what should it do. He clarifies further that as soon as Satoshi stepped back and threw the project onto his shoulders, one of the first things he did was try to decentralize that so that if he got hit by a bus it would be clear that the project would go on. At this point, that’s why five people have commit access to the GitHub Bitcoin source tree while there’s kind of this consensus process for what changes are made to the code with the consensus level, low-level changes to the Bitcoin rules should happen. 

How Has Forking Helped The Popularity Of Bitcoin?

In case users disagree with the path the developers take, with other types of open-source software such as Linux, they can take the code and fork it adding whatever features they desire into their version. Users then can choose the version of the software they would rather run while forking mechanism is possible with Bitcoin as well since it is a financial network worth billions, forking a much riskier endeavor than with other open-source projects. 

Resulting in financial loss forking the network results for those sending/receiving transactions when it occurs as well as splitting the network into two weaker competing networks that are more susceptible to attack .with the situation coming with a two network that would most likely not last long, one network should take over the other relatively quickly which is a less than ideal situation where simply put is a Bitcoin fork can be avoided, then it should be.

While the Bitcoin community is at crossroads currently many users wish to raise the capacity of the network with main developers wanting to keep it at its current capacity of 1MB every 10 minutes until they all agree on a solution. Two main developers as a result of perceived developer inaction have chosen to create a fork of the Bitcoin software implementing an increase against the wishes of the majority of developers.

What Is All The Hype About Bitcoin XT?

With the choice of running Bitcoin Core or the new forked version Bitcoin XT users approach is as designed to require a threshold of users quite before its forking capacity increase is implemented. 2 weeks later the capacity increases will begin as 75% of miners choose to run XT resulting at that point in an incompatibility with Bitcoin core. As Andresen says thinking a lot of the strife and conflict incoming with it, they are starting to grow beyond even that there are a lot more stakeholders with a lot more people involved with a lot more projects. Whereas how they evolve from is used to just be Satoshi making decisions to it was this small group making decisions suddenly where there’s a much larger set of people interested in decisions and how they are made. 

To Be Continued…

This discussion is continued in the next post. It explains the future of Bitcoin beyond forking. There are still more difficult hurdles it has to clear while being the most popular cryptocurrency. The Bitcoin ecosystem shows that there is still more to be taken into account while the Bitcoin industry helps stay afloat the developers into the mining industry. You can get the entire picture helping the Bitcoin developers develop more.