1) Bitcoin governance used to be much more centralized. Quoting a piece from @random_walker about the 2013 bitcoin fork. Worth revisiting this incident.
freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/07/28/ana…
freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/07/28/ana…
2) "On March 11, 2013, Bitcoin experienced a technical crisis. Versions 0.7 and 0.8 of the software diverged from each other in behavior due to a bug, causing the block chain to “fork” into two."
3) "Considering how catastrophic a hard fork can be, the crisis was resolved quickly with remarkably little damage owing to the exemplary competence of the developers in charge."
4) "More surprisingly, it also shows the effectiveness of strong central leadership. That’s because the commonsense solution to the fork — as well as the one programmed into the software itself — was to encourage miners running old versions to upgrade."
5) "As it turns out, the correct response was exactly the opposite. Even a delay of a few hours in adopting the downgrade solution would have been very risky, as I’ll argue, with potentially devastating consequences."
6) "Without the central co-ordination of the Bitcoin Core developers and the strong trust that the community places in them, it is inconceivable that adopting this counterintuitive solution could have been successfully accomplished."
7) "Further, two more aspects of centralization proved very useful The first is the ability of a few developers who possess a cryptographic key to broadcast alert messages to every client, which in this case was used to urge them to downgrade."
8) "The second is the fact that the operator of BTC Guild, a large mining pool at the time, was able to singlehandedly shift the balance of mining power to the old branch by downgrading."
9) "Contrary to the view of the consensus protocol as fixed in stone by Satoshi, it is under active human stewardship, and the quality of that stewardship is essential to its security."
10) "Centralized decision-making saved the day here, and for the most part it’s not in conflict with the decentralized nature of the network itself. The human element becomes crucial when the code fails or needs to adapt over time (e.g., the block size debate)."
11) "We should accept and embrace the need for a strong leadership and governance structure instead of treating decentralization as a magic bullet."
