Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] [BIP/Draft] BIP Acceptance Process

From: Peter Todd <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Sep 2015 16:31:44 -0400

On Fri, Sep 04, 2015 at 01:13:18PM -0700, Andy Chase via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> Thanks for your thoughts.
> 
> My proposal isn't perfect for sure. There's likely much better ways to do
> it. But to be clear what I'm trying to solve is basically this:
> 
> Who makes high-level Bitcoin decisions? Miners, client devs, merchants, or
> users? Let's set up a system where everyone has a say and clear acceptance
> can be reached.

It depends on a case-by-case basis.

E.g. for soft-forks miners can do what they want with little ability for
other parties to have a say. For non-consensus-related standards - e.g.
address formats - it's quite possible for a BIP to be "accepted" even if
only a small group of users use the standard. For hard-forks almost
everyone is involved, though who can stop a fork isn't as well defined.

IMO trying to "set up a system" in that kind of environment is silly,
and likely to be a bureaucratic waste of time. Let the market decide, as
has happened previously. If you're idea isn't getting acceptance, do a
better job of convincing the people who need to adopt it that it is a
good idea.

No amount of words on paper will change the fact that we can't force
people to run software they don't want to run. The entire formal part of
the BIP process is simply a convenience so we have clear, short, numbers
that we can refer to when discussing ideas and standards. The rest of
the process - e.g. what Adam Back and others have been referring to when
attempting to dissuade Hearn and Andresen - is by definition always
going to be a fuzzy, situation-specific, and generally undefined
process.

Or put another way, even if you did create your proposed process, the
first time those committees "approved" a BIP that relevant stakeholders
disagreed with, you'd find out pretty quickly that "clear acceptance" of
your 4% sample would fall apart the moment the other 96% realized what a
tiny minority was intending to do. Particularly if it was one of the
inhernet cases where the underlying math means a particular group - like
miners - has the ability to override what another group wants out of
Bitcoin.

-- 
'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
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