Consensus and governance have been two main topics of conversation in the Bitcoin community over the past year. While making changes to Bitcoin Core may seem trivial to some, the politics associated with certain proposals have caused major issues for the development process.
Bitcoin Developer and Ciphrex CEO Eric Lombrozo gave a talk that mainly focused on potential options for scaling Bitcoin at the Blockchain Agenda Conference in San Diego, and he dedicated a portion of his presentation to the current issues surrounding possible changes to Bitcoin’s consensus rules. Lombrozo covered soft forks, hard forks and a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) that could eventually make it easier to deploy soft forks on the network
Problems with Changing Bitcoin’s Consensus Rules
Before getting into possible solutions, Lombrozo first discussed the current issues with coming to consensus on new rules for the Bitcoin network. Although Bitcoin’s decentralization is what makes the network valuable to its users, the lack of a central decider who can dictate the rules of the network has been an issue. Lombrozo explained:
Whenever we want to change the consensus rules, this presents a serious problem because we don’t really want to just force new rules on the network. There’s no central authority that can do this really. We need to have a way for the network to adapt to the new rules, decide whether or not it wants to adjust to these rules, and to make sure that everyone still ends up agreeing in the end
Some have stated a benevolent dictator is needed for Bitcoin, and former Bitcoin Developer Mike Hearn intended to take on that role for the alternative implementation of the Bitcoin protocol known as Bitcoin XT. While Bitcoin software clients are able to have benevolent dictators behind the code, the ability for users to choose which code to run on their own computers makes the idea of a benevolent dictator of the Bitcoin protocol an impractical notion.
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https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bip-enabling-easier-changes-and-upgrades-to-bitcoin-1453929816
