Thread by @lrettig

Ethereum governance has failed.

We are a de facto technocracy, where a small group of technocrats, the core devs, have final say over what goes into the protocol.

But the challenges we face today are increasingly non-technical. Core devs don't want to make these decisions because they feel unqualified, fear legal liability, are conflict avoidant, and prefer just to write code.

EF will not make these decisions for fear of taking sides. EF has also lost legitimacy for failing to deliver a new ethereum.org, for failing to pay its developers, for failing to reply to grant applications, etc.

I see the following options on the table and I am extremely curious which the community will choose. (Remember, indecision is choice, too.)

1. Give up on governance entirely, and be like Bitcoin. Hard decisions will not get made, the protocol will not evolve, progress will slow, and other projects will eat Ethereum's lunch.

2. Replace technocracy with plutocracy. Ether holders would be all too happy to take control of decision making. (Democracy is not even on the table as long as we don't have formalized, unique identity.)

3. Double down on the tyranny of structurelessness that we're in today. Give up on technocracy, embrace capture by the elites, the well-connected, the already-powerful.

4. Admit that decentralized governance just does not work, give up on Ethereum, and find something better to work on.

5. Admit that decentralized governance does not work _yet_, but that we might someday figure it out. Fall back on centralized governance for the time being. Introduce transparency, accountability, the best tools we have for clean governance. Try our best to avoid capture.

It's a rather unappetizing menu. If (5.) is the best we can do for now - what's the point, right? What makes us think that decentralized governance will suddenly start working at some point in the future? What would that take, realistically? What's our roadmap?

And yet, in cases 1-4, we've given up, abrogated, and admitted that the Ethereum experiment has already failed.

What am I missing?

Let me pre-empt a lot of trolling: "has failed" is strong, maybe a bit too strong. "is failing" or "risks failing" or "is stuck" all work too. The point is, we're stuck. Ethereum is still running, blocks are still being produced, but we're stuck.