Consensus and Bitcoin

[Pacioli]

Since I'm a beginner, and am looking for strategies for getting new beginners this seem like a good as place as any to post(politics and society sounded good too...).  

I’ve done a lot of community organizing with activists and anarchists who are into the consensus decision making process instead of majority voting democratic process. In the past few months that I’ve been learning about bitcoin I’ve noticed that the word consensus gets used a bit and I’m wondering how a like and different consensus in Bitcoin is to the decision making process. It seems like that could be a good way to broach the subject in a way that will draw my friends in.

I’ve noticed three different situations where the term is used. I may be missing some, or misidentifying them, let me know if that’s the case.

1.   In the way that the open source software gets developed
2.   How new versions of the software get adopted
3.   How newly discovered blocks get propagated through the network and determined to be correct

None of these being things that I (or my friends) have had much experience with. My initial impression is that first situation, open source development, probably does have a lot of the egalitarian and participatory processes that consensus based system do even if it isn’t explicitly stated as “consensus.”

The last two I’m not so sure about. It seems like a race to 51%, but the decision making rule isn’t the defining feature of consensus. I don’t know enough about the computer science to really understand the process so it might be very similar. Words can take much different meanings in different contexts and in switching from a human organization context to a computer science context I wonder if the meaning of the terms are significantly different.

[Wendigo]

I honestly cant understand what you are talking about 

[Sonny]

The core devs can make changes to the code (ban micropayment, lower tx fee, etc), and publish a new version of bitcoin-qt / bitcoind, but it is up to the users to adopt it.

The mining pools can change the policy on how they include tx into a block (no free tx, larger block size, etc), but it is up to the users (people with mining hardware / hashrate) to leave or join the pools.

[Pacioli]

I hadn't though of the mining pools. Would that be kind of how stock work? If you don't like it you can leave? 

Wendigo, I'm basically talking about how Occupy tried to run their meetings. I work with a few people that were into it and have seen it in action a couple of times. The pros are that you get a lot of buy in and if the only way to get things done is by community will you want every one on board and if anybody is vehemently opposed usually policies or changed can be blocked. The critiques are that it can encourage groupthink and make organizations too conservative (in the not changing way, not american politcs way). Either way, these people are good at organizing and would probably be good allies of cryptocurrencies and I'm trying to find the common link.