On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 5:11 PM, Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net> wrote:

Right now there is this nice warm fuzzy notion that decisions in Bitcoin Core are made by consensus. "Controversial" changes are avoided. I am trying to show you that this is just marketing.

Consensus is arrived when the people who are most active at the time (active in contributing to discussions, code review, giving opinions etc.) agreed to ACK. There are a regular staple of active contributors. Bitcoin development is clearly a meritocracy. The more people participate and contribute the more weight their opinions hold.

Nobody can define what these terms even mean. It would be more accurate to say decisions are vetoed by whoever shows up and complains enough, regardless of technical merit. After all, my own getutxo change was merged after a lot of technical debate (and trolling) ..... then unmerged a day later because "it's a shitstorm".

I am not sure that is fair, your PR was reverted because someone found a huge exploit in your PR enough to invalidate all your arguments used to get it merged in the first place.

So if Gavin showed up and complained a lot about side chains or whatever, what you're saying is, oh that's different. We'd ignore him. But when someone else complains about a change they don't like, that's OK.

Heck, I could easily come up with a dozen reasons to object to almost any change, if I felt like it. Would I then be considered not a part of the consensus because that'd be convenient?

I don't think it's as simple as that. Objections for the sake of objections, or unsound technical objections are going to be seen for what they are. This is a project with of some of the brightest people in the world in this field. Sure people can be disruptive but their reputation stand the test of time.

The consensus system might not be perfect, but it almost feels like you want to declare a state of emergency and suspend all the normal review process for this proposed hard fork.