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Comment by Frondo | Hacker News Reader

Well, because, frankly speaking, they're trying to pull off a very different power structure without getting buy-in from everyone involved.

Green U.S. money? At least, at the end of the election cycle, I can cast a vote for someone who will appoint a Fed chair I like. There's some tenuous link from the decision-makers back to me, an American voter.

The bitcoin people? They just said "here it is, oh and also we call all the shots, kthxbye". What if there's some feature of the new power structure I don't like? Where can I seek redress? Ask a bitcoin advocate, and what you get is crickets.

A new power structure should be more inclusive of people's voices, not less.

So, in this case, I welcome the failure.

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You can vote for someone that says they'll appoint that Fed chair. And even then the Fed chair could have reason to implement policy that is contrary to your interests.

In fact, the status quo is that your opinion and vote for that person is ignored. I'm reminded of the Princeton/Northwestern study suggested Congress passes laws that run contrary to the will of the people ~90% of the time.

So what's the value in your tenuous link when inputs are sent straight to /dev/null

https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...

With bitcoin, the election cycle is always happening. Every single block miners decide which rules they want to enforce, and which proposals they want to signal support for. You want to support 2 MB blocks? Run Bitcoin Classic, or point your mining software toward a pool that supports it. You want to support segwit? Run Core 0.12.1. Ultimately, the market decides what becomes of bitcoin, not some unaccountable, unelected bureaucrat.

Also, with bitcoin, all interaction is completely voluntary. There are no legal tender laws or taxation propping up the value of the currency.

> So, in this case, I welcome the failure.

I wouldn't hold your breath. Bitcoin has been through many incidents that are far worse than this, and it's only come out stronger for it.

That's not an election. That's not voting.

And you and the other guy are illustrating really well what I mean about the bitcoiner anti-democratic point of view.

Running a piece of software isn't voting, and isn't "power to the people," but you guys get so stuck up on this wordplay about how running the software is the real, authentic "voting" that you really kinda miss the boat there.

So, well done with that.

So what does a real authentic vote look like to you, in a decentralized system?

Who calls for the vote? Who counts them? Who is allowed to vote? Who isn't? Who proposes ideas for a vote?

When the pool of people who understand what Bitcoin is gets totally overwhelmed by people who don't, what keeps really stupid decisions from being made?

When people vote for something that isn't already coded, who is responsible for coding it?

What you are describing is not a democracy, it's a textbook plutocracy.

> At least, at the end of the election cycle, I can cast a vote for someone who will appoint a Fed chair I like.

With Bitcoin, you can "cast your vote" for what software the network is running too; you buy a miner and contribute to a mining pool that agrees with your philosophies. Of course, unlike a federal election (or maybe not...), more capital => more votes.

The core developers really don't have any power beyond that given to them by individual miners and mining investors.

Well, and that is simply not casting a vote. Voting isn't just, as I said elsewhere here recently, "inferring preferences from behavior". It's a regular process, a structured reassessing of power.

Maybe if you said "every year on March 1st, everyone shuts down their client and chooses a new one" and there were several well-maintained clients that had different policy choices encoded into them for people to "vote" with, then we'd be a little closer to a democratic power-in-the-hands-of-the-people kind of thing.

But as it is right now? No, there's no voting, nor democratic power-sharing, in Bitcoin.

What guarantees do you have the president you elect will do what he says? What is your recourse if he doesn't live up to your expectations?

Being able to change one's vote at any time regarding any issue seems preferable to everyone sitting powerless for four years at a time in between scheduled elections.

"Being able to change one's vote at any time regarding any issue seems preferable to everyone sitting powerless for four years at a time in between scheduled elections"

I'm not even addressing what the OP was telling you, that you don't vote and that the "votes" are all in the hands of a few people.

But, even if everyone was entitled to a vote, being able to change it anytime they like would make a for a very, very poor government system.

I can only imagine, 1st long term project the government had that didn't give you short term profit you would change your vote.

P.S.: Interestingly enough is exactly what is happening in Bitcoin right now: long term sustainability calls for changes to the block size, but short term profit calls for it to remain the same, so the few miners that control the network just go for the short term profit.

> But, even if everyone was entitled to a vote, being able to change it anytime they like would make a for a very, very poor government system.

I don't disagree. But you can hardly call it "undemocratic".

The undemocratic part was not that one. Like I said: "even if everyone was entitled to a vote and to change it whenever they want" and then carried out the argument based on that alternative scenario to bitcoin reality and explained why that would be a bad system.

The reality is that just an handful of people can vote in this system, the ones that control all the mining. All other people are left using a system in which they have no say.

That's a classical textbook Plutocracy and completely un-democratic.

fwiw, many people don't agree with the "for sustainability" argument.

Increasing blocksize is actually a negative, because it lets people continue sending low-value transactions that they wouldn't actually pay for. It externalizes their costs to the entire network, making verification harder, etc.

When the required fee makes your current uses of btc unprofitable, either send larger amounts at a time or use a sidechain, etc. The fee is a DoS-prevention mechanism.

You and the other bitcoin advocates here are actually doing a really good job illustrating my point.

I'm saying, bitcoin isn't "power to the people," that it is anti-democratic by design, and you and the other guy here are trying to dodge and ignore that with language games about "the market decides" and irrelevant stuff about how politicians lie.

I get it, bitcoin is your chance to be one of the people "in the know" as it were, one of the powerful ones, and you don't want to give that up. Please spare us the rhetoric about how it's for our own good, though.

One of the powerful ones? Hah. What power is that exactly?

All I can do is choose which client to run. You have all the power I do. That anyone does.

That's really interesting as a libertarian to hear that sort of perspective. It's so reversed from how I see things. To me, you have a vote which has an infinitesimal chance of swaying the election, and then you hope that the candidate you voted for appoints a fed chair you like. Further, you hope that fed chair does a good job, and that their policies are correct. If not, you have to wait four years for to give the same input.

With Bitcoin, you just...don't use Bitcoin. If you're invested at the point somebody does something you don't like, sell off. Presumably the ones on top are heavily invested themselves and will feel a massive sell off in their bottom line.

All that said, the different power structure I was talking about is one where nobody has that kind of power to begin with. That there is somebody at the top at all is a failure, IMO.

> Where can I seek redress? Ask a bitcoin advocate, and what you get is crickets.

No, you've gotten countless answers: "Nowhere."

In the same way you can't reverse a transaction, you can't have a vote. It doesn't work that way.

> A new power structure should be more inclusive of people's voices, not less.

You've had a voice. We've seen your posts about how you're so ignored because nobody is writing a patch to release more coins. It's been heard, but it's a bad idea. If you like that type of currency, use your government's.

> Basically, what bugs me about bitcoin is that legitimate critiques are always brushed off with really absurd replies.

Have you posted any legitimate critiques? I haven't seen any...

> Or the deflationary economics of the system itself, and those aren't good either.

Yeah, that's an example. You don't know the system or the goals so how could you have valid comments, let alone legitimate criticism?

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