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The developers have influence in that they are relied upon to a massive extent to keep bitcoin running. As far as I can tell this sort of centralisation of inf
by plaguuuuuu 14y ago
The developers have influence in that they are relied upon to a massive extent to keep bitcoin running.
As far as I can tell this sort of centralisation of influence is a common emergent property in most anarchic human systems.
Luckily if something particularly egregious occurs in this case, the community can easily fork the codebase and start a rival blockchain.
- oscilloscope 14y ago"Homesteading the Noosphere" by Eric Raymond covers exactly this topic. He compares the open source software ownership to Lockean land titles. With Bitcoin, it's interesting since the project itself is a system of value and transactions. http://catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/homesteading/ http://catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/homesteading/
- joshaidan 14y agoWould they need to start a rival block chain? Or do they just need 51% of the current community to run their clients to take over the current block chain? (as suggested by a comment above)
- gizmo686 14y agoTechnically speaking, getting 51% of the community to switch is still creating a rival block chain. You don't even need 51%. As was the case in this incident, if you have incompatible nodes, the block chain would fork itself naturally.