Consensus

This post is a response to a number of posts from prominent blockchain personalities about how on-chain governance based on coin-holder votes is inherently plutocratic and bad. Vlad Zamfir— Against on-chain governance Vitalik Buterin —Notes on Blockchain Governance Vitalik Buterin — Governance, Part 2: Plutocracy Is Still Bad Haseeb Qureshi — Blockchains should not be democracies Dean Eigenmann —Against community governance I find the use of the term plutocracy in this context to be inaccurate and alarmist.

This article gives my perspective on the governance of blockchains and cryptocurrencies. I didn’t take much interest in the blockchain space until summer of 2017, when the Bitcoin Cash fork and the underlying reasons for it caught my attention. I started looking into this and discovered an interest in how these decentralized networks/projects/currencies make decisions about how they should evolve. On the one hand these are (mostly) open source software projects, but on the other hand the software is being used to run networks that hold hundreds of millions of dollars in value.