It works as-is. We need no additions or power structures.
I definitely don't suggest to
deliberately add power structures, I just want to identify power structures that
are already present, and maybe identify power structures that
could emerge in the future if we aren't careful. I want to introduce some critical thinking against the religious belief that Bitcoin is perfect and will always be what it is now even if we don't guard is carefully.
Maybe my idea about "voting on policies" becomes more clear if you try to imagine what would happen if some disagreement on these policies emerges within the Bitcoin community. As a simple example, let's imagine that
- a part of the community thinks the block reward should never be halved
- this fraction of the community implements their opinion in a patched version of the Bitcoin software
- they connect to the Bitcoin P2P network and start mining with their own software
- If I understand correctly, this will create a block chain fork
- Depending on which fraction has the hashing power majority, one of the chains becomes longer (in terms of total difficulty)
Now I'm not sure whether the Bitcoin software always selects the longest chain, or whether it selects the longest chain
which it considers to be valid (only contains valid transactions & so on). Of course, different clients could behave differently even on this point. The first system would give a "winner takes all", just like traditional democratic government systems, while the second system would "fork the currency"; being roughly equivalent to a country splitting into two smaller countries whenever there is a major disagreement.
@ Hazek 08:58:36 PM:
Please scan your post for all occurrences of "force", "enforce" and similar words. It sounds a bit contradictory to me, but maybe I don't understand. If "a miner is an enforcer", then what does he enforce, and upon who?
Like most analogies, mine is not perfect, but I still think there are many similarities. To clarify it a bit further:
If a piece of Bitcoin software is computer-encoded policy, then pool operators can vote for or against that policy by using or not using that piece of software. Non-pooled mining is like a direct democracy, where miners vote directly for against policy (here, policy is whatever software the miners themselves decide to use). Pooled mining is like a representative democracy, where the pool operator is the representative, and miners vote for him by joining the pool. I don't know the exact details of how pools typically operate, and this may be different for different pools, but I can imagine that some decisions are made by the pool operator and some are made by the individual miners.
About the decision on the economical value of Bitcoin: I think this is not different from any other economic item. In that sense it's not different from dollars, euro's, gold, chickens, computer memory, or even from non-scarce items, such as copies of publicly available information. I think
value is subjective, and is a matter of individual belief and/or trade-off; nobody can force you to value something in a certain way. Of course it might be possible in a non-free market that somebody forces you to perform a transaction that goes against your belief of the value of the exchanged items. If you think such forced transactions are possible in the Bitcoin system, that can be part of the discussion in this thread.
