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Re:The Schism Over Bitcoin Is How Bitcoin Is Supposed to Work by nickik on Friday February 12, 2016 @02:00PM (#11089520)
Their is no "supposed to" in Bitcoin. Its an experiment that went totally insane. It does not have any way of finding agreement that ankered within the blockchain. The potential value that could be destroyed is so big that it compels people to find some kind of agreemnt.

Newer blockchains are already learning from these problems and are innovating. Bitshares for example has the goverment structure built in, most of the paramaters can be chainged by voting.

Now that does not make it democracy as we know it, because the power of the vote is based on how much stack you have. Its essentially a company with stack holders.

Doing a democracy as we have it in real live will be hard because of the identity problem.

Bitcoin need some way to resolve these conflicts and if possible root the choices in the blockchain itself.

This issue really forces you to think about how we make choices in groupes, and what is "fair".

Their is a lot of research on this in political economics. James Buchanen had interesting things to say about the Economic of Club and the Economics of Constitution.

I also recommend,"Choosing in Groups: Analytical Politics Revisited"

Re:The Schism Over Bitcoin Is How Bitcoin Is Supposed to Work by the_rosentotter on Friday February 12, 2016 @02:48PM (#11089965)
I don't think there is a problem with the way bitcoin works. The majority of miners, i.e. the people who actually have invested the money to run the network, decide what software to run, and therefore what bitcoin is.

Bitcoin depends entirely on the self-interest of the involved parties to not destroy the system they have invested so much in. That's how much of the real world works too.

Re:The Schism Over Bitcoin Is How Bitcoin Is Supposed to Work by TD-Linux on Friday February 12, 2016 @02:52PM (#11090004)
No, the miners don't decide what Bitcoin is. If a miner produces an invalid block, other Bitcoin nodes will reject it.

It's true that the recent hard fork proposals have keyed off miner voting, but they wouldn't have to - they could just activate at a certain time, block height, strawpoll vote API, or whatever.