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.
-------- 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_20160331023311_gfms_gold_survey_2016_2.pdf
https://trmcs-documents.s3.amazonaws.com/377d4e994bb540b286d7ccf30b81bece_20160505120341_World%20Silver%20Survey%202016.pdf
https://trmcs-documents.s3.amazonaws.com/377d4e994bb540b286d7ccf30b81bece_20160512074418_GFMS%20Platinum%20Group%20Metals%20Survey%202016.pdf
https://trmcs-documents.s3.amazonaws.com/377d4e994bb540b286d7ccf30b81bece_20160405034444_GFMS%20Copper%20Survey%202016.pdf
https://trmcs-documents.s3.amazonaws.com/ec6fa1ac9669b3b012c8275107819088_20161026080134_GFMS%20Base%20Metals%20Review%202016Final.pdf
Bitcoin
https://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/30d
https://coinmarketcap.com/