Power distribution and policy decision. How can we, the users, have a vote in what options we are given?

[GentlemenHODL]

The recent scaling at HK was a eye opener for a lot of people. We had > 90% of hashing power via pool operators standing on one stage, answering questions.

One thing that was *very* clear, to many people who were present and those who watched, is that the miners were all consistent in their answers in regards to direction on blocksize:

They want the core maintainers of the software to make the hard decisions in regards to blocksize. They are essentially giving up their vote, saying "we want you to choose for us".

Let us look at the current distribution of power:

- Core Maintainers
- Miners
- Exchanges
- Merchants
- Customers

The power distribution is listed in a relevant order here. Everyone understands that the miners a key group in the power distribution. Without network security bitcoin is worthless, so the direction that miners take will be the winning software choice. They are much higher on the decision making chain, only a step beneath the maintainers from the Top down perspective of maintainers providing software, and then the voting mechanism to choose which software is run.

Its more so the miners that get to chose the software than the users, and it is important to understand this power dynamic. The miners will chose the majority as its in their economic interests, and if we only have one option from our core maintainers, there can only be one choice. Ignoring the power of the core maintainers in this position of authority is to appeal to delusion. Their vote counts more, as well as everyone knows, than a competitor. Add a mining power allocation and their vote becomes a dictatorship.

The core maintainers prefer to take a neutral stance, stating it is the users which decide which software is run. They stay out of economic decisions and leave that to the community at wide to decide.

But if the power distribution model has been disrupted, and the miners have allocated their voting power to the core maintainers, does that change the position of authority for the core maintainers? Are they not then in a position of dictatorship, knowing that the option they give is the option that will succeed?

In this event, I would state that the only way for the core maintainers to balance the power distribution is to provide multiple options for the community to decide upon. Any single solution they provide, given the context of the miners allocating their voting decision, is going to be the winning decision. This action cannot be ignored as it represents a cabal and takes away the decentralized nature of bitcoin. This is literally a point of failure within the ecosystem, one so large that we *must* hash it out and make our voice heard, otherwise this can be manipulated in the future to undesirable outcomes.

Can the core maintainers ignore this position and continue to provide only one solution? Currently we have reached a rough consensus that the way forward is going to be based on gmaxwell's plan here:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/piper ... 11865.html

Which calls for a implementation of SW as a softwork, and *keeping the traditional blocksize at 1mb*. You can see current voting here: https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/bitc ... /pull/1165

In this, I wholeheartedly agree with /u/jgarzik and his direction, which he has voiced publicly but this specific quote was mentioned in private:

"Maintainers should come up with a menu of possibilities and let the community have a voice in choosing. There needs to be more communication to users and more choices given."

I brought up the issue of contentious hardforks, and how core maintainers may have a moral and economic responsibility to not submit those to public in fear of forking the community at large. His response:

"IMO it is done in stages - try to measure consensus - roll out - measure adoption and have fallbacks (failure scenarios) plotted out. Each point - merge / release / initial adoption / wide adoption provides opportunity for feedback and further consensus measuring -before- a chain fork. **All the block size increases require 80-90% hashpower lock-in**, at a minimum and miners tend to be conservative, following, not leading, consensus. Miners want to stick with the economic majority, because that maximizes the value of their bitcoin income."

What this means, is that if we were given *two* options, say potentially:

- Segwitness softfork, which would allow for a theoretical 4mb of blockspace. 1mb would be the old type blockspace, and the hardcap for prior-to-SW transactions, and 3mb allocated for SW transactions. This would give a *potential* bump of 1.75x in blockspace for traditional non-P2SH tx's, assuming network wide adoption. Users have speculated, and sipa has agreed (on #bitcoin-dev), that short term we may only see a 1.25 increase in blockspace, due to the nature of adoption speed. Long term 1.75x with potential for 4x including P2SH and other implementations to come, short term 1.25x blocksize alleviation.

- Above proposal + Any and all BIPs. Could be BIP202, BIP101, BIP102, BIP248. All BIP's would need a threshold of 95% for activation, so there is no risk of segmentation within the community.

This would allow the users to *truly* have a voice. So long as the core maintainers have a majority of authority granted to them, they cannot ignore that they have a over-wielding reach of power. The only way they can distribute that power is by giving the users *more choices*.

Since a hardfork would require a non-contentious event, then allocating a 95% activation threshold removes that argument. If there are multiple proposals out there in the wild, then it does not matter so long as all play by the same rules. And they *will* all play by the same rules so long as there is a 95% threshold on activation!

All this would do would be to grant users the *choice* of which software they wish to run, as initially envisioned by satoshi and continued by the bitcoin community at large. So long as the core maintainers ignore their position of authority and only grant one software choice, then AFAIK, then the decentralized model has failed and has instead become a cabal of priests dictating from a position of authority.

As a final note, to those who are going to say "You have always had a choice to run alternative software", you would not be incorrect. But you would be ignoring reality. You would be ignoring the power distribution model of the current dynamics of the core maintainers, and how miners have elected them to make choices. You would be ignoring the rampant censorship in this sub that has disallowed talk of competing software.

And look where that has landed us. Now, in a scenario where the core maintainers have a higher authority than what they even themselves admit is appropriate, we cannot even discuss alternative implementations. This to me further hardens the case that it is imperative for the core maintainers to provide *more options* to the users so that *we may actually get to chose which software we run* instead of the cabal deciding for us, and also for the moderators of this forum to discontinue this abhorrent censorship of an agenda that *must be discussed*.

Please understand that the core maintainers did not ask for this. They are not to be blamed for being put in this situation by the miners. But also by specifically choosing to *not* respond to the change of authority, they are allowing a power change to occur which is against the original ideology of the decentralized nature of bitcoin. If miners are no longer voting with their hash power on which software they will run, if they are saying "you choose and we will run it" then you cannot claim it is decentralized and action *must* be taken to prevent this redistribution of power.

[LiteCoinGuy]

thx for that GentlemenHODL.

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"Now, in a scenario where the core maintainers have a higher authority than what they even themselves admit is appropriate, we cannot even discuss alternative implementations. This to me further hardens the case that it is imperative for the core maintainers to provide *more options* to the users so that *we may actually get to chose which software we run* instead of the cabal deciding for us, and also for the moderators of this forum to discontinue this abhorrent censorship of an agenda that *must be discussed*."
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at least we had 2 conferences about that topic with alot (theoretical improvements) thanks to Gavin. and we now have this forum where everyone is free to talk about any bitcoin software.

this BIP process is a slow process in general but it makes sure that there is no malicious code/actors. on the other side, one or two core devs could be paid by the banks to "veto" every consensus...

[arsenische]

Bitcoin is a decentralized autonomous organization and its shareholders (bitcoin holders) should vote with their signatures.