There's some really good points here. We've been exploring the styles of governance ourselves with the Zen project and we've unintentionally mirrored the founding of the United States (for better or less). After a period of private collaboration we decided to use a synergistic model using Core Officers which are elected to provide governance for the project and also to govern initiatives that the DAO has funded. This is matched with a DAO which provides funding for projects and ultimately decides on Core officers (and their fate). Instead of absolute stalemate as seen with Bitcoin & Bitcoin Unlimited, there are many ways both the Core and DAO could incentivize and also resist change if they were to become oppositional. And let's not lost sight here that Satoshi himself could probably be identified as a benevolent dictator because he did indeed build a system nearly by himself and there are persons today that still try to carry out his will. In fact, some believe that any alteration that breaks the current Bitcoin model is only a corruption of the true spirit of Bitcoin. All hail Satoshi. @movrcx https://zencash.io Sent from [ProtonMail](https://protonmail.ch), encrypted email based in Switzerland. -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Governance vs Decentralised Systems, Gold, Cash, Bitcoin Local Time: March 18, 2017 3:58 PM UTC Time: March 18, 2017 7:58 PM From: grarpamp@gmail.com To: cypherpunks@cpunks.org https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtwaW79Fj7c Governance problems which have allowed skeptics in the media to latch on to the failures of decentralised systems. Decentralisation isn't a Boolean, it's a range. Is it much more decentralised than anything we've built before, including its governance? Yes. You will not notice that developers and miners really don't have control to effect change until something goes wrong, until there's a highly contentious issue. They may want to offer a straightforward, direct, and simple solution, but the system won't let them do that. Lead developers can make limited decisions about what they include in the code, but with blockchains you can either have opinions or continue to make money; if your opinions get too strong, you stop making money. Governance in these systems is tricky because by making those explicit trade-offs, we get liberty. If you want to have quick / simple / easy solutions, you will elect a dictator. The trains may run on time, but the destination might be a death camp, an efficient operation for killing people. Democracy is incredibly inefficient, but we practice it anyway because we appreciate the trade-offs that it gives us: self-expression; self-determination; freedom of association, of religion, of consciousness. Governance in network-centric systems are open to permissionless access and innovation, systems which exhibit a very high degree of autonomy and censorship resistance. The price we pay is that our debates are loud, messy, and sometimes don't end, because there's no centralised authority to filter everyone's opinions; that's how corporations and governments run. We've tried that, and if we want that kind of money, we have that kind of money. The bottom line is that this not an accident, it's an explicit trade-off: efficiency is the price we pay to buy liberty. I will pay that price because I can apply engineering optimisation to efficiency; Bitcoin and Ethereum were the first times I could apply engineering optimisation to liberty. Currency Wars, Bitcoin Neutrality https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0o_Mg5hY4g Shorter Version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diw-5vWVW5o India https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J_RVI0ZdRE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLNZ_ydSqnM No Gold, No Wedding https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUr2E4dfs0Y https://financial-risk-solutions.thomsonreuters.info/GFMS https://trmcs-documents.s3.amazonaws.com/377d4e994bb540b286d7ccf30b81bece_20... https://trmcs-documents.s3.amazonaws.com/377d4e994bb540b286d7ccf30b81bece_20... https://trmcs-documents.s3.amazonaws.com/377d4e994bb540b286d7ccf30b81bece_20... https://trmcs-documents.s3.amazonaws.com/377d4e994bb540b286d7ccf30b81bece_20... https://trmcs-documents.s3.amazonaws.com/ec6fa1ac9669b3b012c8275107819088_20... Bitcoin https://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/30d https://coinmarketcap.com/