So maybe if there is a good enough reason, just go ahead and change it?
I'm right there with you.
Problem is, we're dealing with terms that are hardly defined.
Examples: Social Contract, Cryptocurrency inflation, Cryptocurrency emission.
The technology has advanced quite a bit in the last few years, but these types of terms are hardly light subjects.
We've effectively created new morals and guidelines, with technology that's not even a decade.
For the most part, people say that these guidelines need to be followed, and so many of them absolutely refuse to debate them even further.
For example, why is there not a valid voting method in place that can effectively change these terms over a certain amount of time? These aren't commandments given to us as some mandate from heaven, they're bylaws created by ourselves for ourselves. To not even acknowledge that is inane.
We have proof of work, and that's a pretty reasonable vote, but even that is hardly a feudal vote that represents people's wishes. It's okay, and definitely a good way to start with small clusters of people, but look at the damn state it's in now. Entire warehouses filled with graphics cards sitting there breaking little more than passwords. Damn joke in its current state. It needs fixed.
I mean, even my apartment lease contract, insurance contracts, and terms of usage for software change yearly, sometimes even on a monthly basis. It's hardly regulation from a group of elected officials. This is the terms set forth that reflect often reasonable co-existence of user and provider that need to be maintained because time passes and nobody's Jesus and there will be problems that cannot be seen beforehand.
But with cryptocurrencies, we have tried to create a system of only users, with a goal of ultimate decentralization, and then with these five year old commandments from some unknown long since estranged godlike figure we tell people that these rules are undeniable, and any permutation of them is an abhorrent abuse toward the creator that will surely damn us all to hell. See where I'm going here?
We've provided ourselves an effective means of prototyping a cryptocurrency, but no such means of actually maintaining it after implementation. I think this is crazy because all this causes is new coins on top of new coins. I mean ffs if I couldn't change the tires on my car or give it an oil change, or a paint job, or an engine upgrade, change it over to use propane or ethanol then what would I do instead? I'd buy a new car.
We've effectively created a planned obsolescence for cryptocurrencies by not spending just as much time debating inflation, emission, and social contract as we have debating the technicality of the source code or whether we're gonna write a currency in cpp or golang. No fucken wonder we have so many - there's no way to fix them and there's no was to tell if it's broken. We've managed to make one of the most significant revolutions in value exchange, but refuse to admit that the three aforementioned terms are not part of the VIN. The VIN is the genesis block.
Sorry for the car reference, but I'm trying to break this down into easy to understand parts for myself.
We need to have valid maintenance tools. And I'm not talking about build tests, that's more of a NDT style of repair. We need voting mechanisms that can't be gamed, or we need Jesus. We need to have the idea persist that these currencies are for people, and the currency needs to be able to adapt in every way that the people change. The currency needs to serve both the demographic that is currently using the currency, and the demographic that the currency aims to encompass. There won't be one single day in the future where every damn person on the planet wakes up and says: Hey fuck my money I'm gonna use nothing but my favorite cryptocurrency from now until the end of my time here.
No, maybe one or a few hundred a day will have that thought, on a very good day. The ability to scale with a permanently changing and adapting mindset needs to be implemented in these currencies, and PoW hardly cuts it, or any other type of consensus system I've seen here. If it did, then why do we have 400+ bitcoins and not one? Ruling out scams - there are totally legitimate reasons to have a different currency, and it's because both PoW and the 'impending doom' mindset given by anyone promoting sidechains just aren't enough.
Basically, I want a way to open a program that let's me provide one single vote on one single topic, in a way that doesn't compromise my identity to everyone, that can't be gamed such that someone with even twice as many resources as me cannot obtain 2 or even 2^2 more votes than me. I need a mechanism that presents these votes to me in a nondiscriminating way that cannot also be gamed to give me infinite choices to vote on.
We have nothing of this sort, and as such every damn argument is permanently circuitous, and nothing gets done.
I need a program that realizes I'm a damn idiot that might have spent maybe ten seconds thinking about what I'm gonna vote for, and that's okay, so that even though I might not make the right choice, I have the ability to make
a choice at a given date within a certain timeframe, so that time can pass and we don't run in circles for years. Then, when it does or doesn't work out, I need it to do it again.
Then, let the markets and everything else decide if it's the right decision. Why is that so hard to provide?
Add: Consider that the last majorly successful refusal of the king's rule and gold started with a declaration of rights and constitution, and the framework necessary to back those claims up for at least 200 years .. until it got a little derailed. Now consider that your source code is the framework, but there's no file in there stating in plain english what you want to follow and what you believe. Then consider that many of these heaps of source code are accompained by a white paper describing technical details and occasionally brushing on plain english. I don't want just a white paper, I want a constitution aimed at uniting people based on a logical location on a network, instead of a geographical location on a planet. Two or three lines detailing emission, inflation, PoW and codebase just don't quite compare to "We the people ...".
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