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I enjoyed this conversation between @angela_walch and @PeterMcCormack; Angela is probably the most well-researched and nuanced critic of Bitcoin I've heard in recent memory. It's very important that we ask and answer the questions she poses. However... [thread]
I think her analysis of the power dynamics in Bitcoin (or really any opensource project) is incomplete:
1) Her suggestion that core devs be treated as fiduciaries in an official capacity, including recognition and compensation, would be disastrous. Two words: regulatory capture.
1) Her suggestion that core devs be treated as fiduciaries in an official capacity, including recognition and compensation, would be disastrous. Two words: regulatory capture.
Though, as she points out, we devs are, at some moral level, fiduciaries of the project, any "official" appointment would dangerously stratify the power structures by cementing individuals as controllers of Bitcoin.
Imagine if a few official fiduciaries were appointed to Bitcoin and then they went on to use their positions to try to do something like #segwit2x. @JeffGarzik had commit access to Bitcoin Core for a time - what kind of havoc would've ensured had he been some official fiduciary?
Officially appointed positions, devs or otherwise, are antithetical to Bitcoin because they emphasize identity over substance. They introduce rigid political games. People should follow ideas, not cults of personality.
And who's doing this appointing anyway? Who is qualified to decide who these devs are? Is whatever committee that does this not subject to manipulation?
In short: informal, morality-driven fiduciaries: good. Anything more formal than that: probably very bad.
Next up...
In short: informal, morality-driven fiduciaries: good. Anything more formal than that: probably very bad.
Next up...
2) Her claim that "each line of code written is an exercise of power" (paraphrasing) is somewhat misleading.
Unlike conventional exercises of power, (e.g. a change in fed policy) Bitcoin code changes are totally opt-in. Users voluntarily upgrade, and the software they elect to run dictates the ruleset they hold their coins under. Users transact under rules they pick without coercion.
If you don't like the changes core devs make, you don't upgrade or you find another codebase to run.
This may sound simplistic, like telling someone to go live in ungoverned wilderness if they don't like laws on the books, but it's not the same: odds are if you find a rule change undesirable, other people will too and a viable alternative can be made.
There's nothing preventing individual miners from switching codebases (as we've seen with segwit2x) or individual exchanges from picking forks, and you can bet that's just what would happen if tomorrow 80% of the Bitcoin Core devs decided to do something crazy.
Good thing they're not official fiduciaries, eh? 😉
Furthermore the code changes in Bitcoin are non-rivalrous and non-excludable: a public good - meaning that anyone can copy some of them (fork), and start a new system if they don't like other changes.
Conventional power is exerting force over some inherently limited domain or resource. Code changes to Bitcoin just add options.
In actuality, "power" is a very simplistic way of looking at Bitcoin since it's so finely dispersed across participants of the system. This makes it hard to articulate clearly, but that dispersion makes Bitcoin less prone to being gamed.
Obviously hashrate is the closest thing to a limited resource over which power can be exercised, but dynamics there are fluid and fuzzy at best because miners are subject to the desires of users.
Lawyers in particular may be made uncomfortable by the fact that you can't subjugate the "power structure" of Bitcoin to some tidy schematic - I contend that if you could, it would be trivially gameable. And the whole point of Bitcoin is to not be gameable.
