Just had some good reading at

http://www.seedsforchange.org.uk/consensus

"Consensus decision making is a creative and dynamic way of reaching agreement between all members of a group. Instead of simply voting for an item and having the majority of the group getting their way, a group using consensus is committed to finding solutions that everyone actively supports, or at least can live with.

This ensures that all opinions, ideas and concerns are taken into account. Through listening closely to each other, the group aims to come up with proposals that work for everyone. Consensus is neither compromise nor unanimity - it aims to go further by weaving together everyone's best ideas and key concerns - a process that often results in surprising and creative solutions, inspiring both the individual and the group as whole.

Consensus can work in all types of settings - small groups, local communities, businesses, even whole nations and territories. The exact process may differ depending on the size of the group and other factors, but the basic principles are the same. "

The thing is, bitcoin definitely something different with all of what we have seen in the past. A consensus with a small group of people can indeed work fairly well with all the points you mentioned above but how to reach a consensus with a very very large group of people with diametrical point of views? The answer is, it is most likely impossible. This leads us to an impasse where no decisions can be made while the market and all the businesses can't afford to wait forever. I think that XT if forcing that consensus to actually be made at some point.

Because bitcoin is something totally new, so we could not use any traditional method like war and vote to resolve the conflict of interest, it just does not suit, a fork will just cause mutually assured destruction, and most importantly it broke the promise of limited supply of bitcoin. For money, when trust is gone, the value is gone

In fact, if you look at those people that uses consensus decision-making model, they are very close to the group of people that bitcoin users are: anarchists, independent, vountarily

From the main article:
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Who uses consensus?

Consensus is not a new idea. Variations of consensus have been tested and proven around the world and through time.

On the American continent non-hierarchical societies have existed for hundreds of years. Before 1600, five nations - the Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, and Seneca - formed the Haudenosaunee Confederation, which works on a consensual basis and is still in existence today.

There are also many examples of successful and stable utopian communes using consensus decision making such as the Christian Herrnhuter settlement 1741-1760 and the production commune Boimondeau in France 1941-1972.

Christiania, an autonomous district in the city of Copenhagen has been self-governed by its inhabitants since 1971.

Within the co-operative movement many housing co-ops and social enterprises use consensus successfully: prominent examples include Green City, a wholefood wholesaler based in Scotland; and Radical Routes, a network of housing co-ops and workers’ co-ops in the UK.

The business meetings of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) use consensus to integrate the insights of each individual, arriving at the best possible approximation of the Truth.

Political and social activists such as many anarchists and others working for peace, the environment and social justice commonly regard consensus to be essential to their work. They believe that the methods for achieving change need to match their goals and visions of a free, nonviolent, egalitarian society. In protests around the world many mass actions and protest camps involving several thousand people have been organised and carried out using consensus, including the 1999 ‘Battle of Seattle’ World Trade Organisation protest, the 2005 G8 summit protests in Scotland and the Camps for Climate Action in the UK, Germany, Australia, Netherlands and other countries.

Blockchain can help us to get some technical facility but ultimately it is the human that is making decision. You can prohibit any change in protocol, but then you lose the ability to adopt to any unknown future change

I have pointed out this 2 years ago that there is no clear decision making mechanism in the bitcoin community, especially the core devs. But unfortunately at that time I did not noticed and researched consensus decision making model, now it is time to pay more attention to this decision-making model


An example for the importance of consensus building:

The 2013 fork is reversed by an urgent decision among core devs, but obviously it does not satisfy everyone, especially Gavin. Since that decision was not well reached through a consensus model, Gavin felt that he is left over and dis-empowered by the other core devs. This in turn leads to his radical action of joining XT branch and cause turbulence in the whole community 2 years later

A following thought: If people could not reach enough consensus after all efforts, what should they do?

I think the answer is: "Do nothing until they are facing real measurable problems"

Historically, full consensus is usually reached when parties with conflicting interest are all facing the same crisis thus must act towards the same goal

So, if 1MB block is really full and many transactions are experiencing significant delay, it will raise the level of consensus of majority of members to go over to larger blocks

Currently, it is just a threat out of imagination. The stress test several weeks ago has proved that even every block is more than full, the network can still process the transaction normally, and nodes only need to add one line of configuration to discard those very-low-fee transactions to prevent them from entering the mempool

Imagine that one day, even a legitimate 0.01 BTC fee transaction can not be processed (Which makes bitcoin more expensive than bank), then it is very easy to reach consensus to raise the block size

Side chain supporters will try to persuade people to use their solution, but similarly, people must reach enough consensus on that matter. Just read a research paper from bank of england, it said, you don't always need trustless model everywhere. To use offchain financial service, some large wallet service provider is enough, because the transactions are small, the risk for each individual is also small

Based on statistics, majority of bitcoin transactions on blockchain are larger than 0.05 BTC, e.g. $10. So a fee higher than 0.005 btc will start to affect small transactions significantly, but we are far from reaching that status yet

Looks like Bitcoin XT is that crisis.  I like this method for forcing a decision to be made. Instead of waiting for the crisis we wish to avoid, introducing Bitcoin XT forces the issue before we get there.

Bitcoin XT then becomes the default if no consensus can otherwise be reached. If no other consensus is reached, then consensus for XT as the default will eventually be reached instead.

This common threat serves as a catalyst for come to "REAL CONSENSUS", which I believe in our case is a block size increase on Core.


I think if we wait until that point then XT 75% will be reached in panic.


I think this Bitcoin XT model, of introducing a single general solution to the all of the problems with a 75% consensus threat into the mix, all in order to force the community to buckle down and arrive at a "TRUE CONSENSUS" on the best solution, or do nothing and agree that the introduced general solution 75% consensus threat is the best solution.

99.9999% is majority. Whats that of 75%? WTF

I agree with consensus being what we need, but 75% is not enough for a hard fork, we would need more, also, they don't tell all the shitty stuff XT does, they only talk about the 8MB blocksize increase (which we don't need that much now, BTC is still a niche used software).

Good topic. I like

That's the reason those anarchists select this consensus based model to make decisions, it suits bitcoin community very well