Jihan Wu is a founder of the mining company Bitmain and an influential force in the cryptocurrency space. He spoke on many topics at the Future of Bitcoin conference in Arnhem, Netherlands, which took place June 30 to July 1. The title of his talk was “Why Multiple Implementations are Quite Important for Bitcoin.”
One of the most powerful things Wu discussed was the psychology of authority that is surrounding the bitcoin ecosystem. Wu talked about several popular social psychological experiments and how they may play out in the current unfolding drama. He opened, however, by discussing different ways society is organized by governments: aristocracy, monarchy, oligarchy, tyranny, and democracy.
Dictatorship in Crypto-Projects
He said crypto-project founders could potentially be tyrants or dictators. He said usually founders have contributed the most to a project, though. The founder’s skills are well recognized and he/she knows everyone who contributed…and is almost renowned. But Wu points out this could cause problems and create a platform for dictatorship. He elaborated:
"Why can’t we see other ways to organize as Aristotle described? Democracy is not possible in opensource software. That is because developer’s software is very complicated and abstract. And who is good and who is bad is most of the time obvious, and you cannot just vote to decide which way the software is going to go. So tyranny is there and lack of enforcement is there. It is not open source software then. It is Microsoft. It is Office. Maybe this is why Microsoft is so hated in the opensource software community."
https://news.bitcoin.com/jihan-wu-talks-about-obedience-to-authority-in-the-cryptocurrency-space/
