Do devs or miners decide the future of a protocol?

Lessons to be learned? How much influence do users really have?

We’ve already seen miners and manufacturers battle and horse-trade over the future of the Litecoin protocol. Litecoin China Roundtable and UASF | by shaolinfry | Medium, https://twitter.com/SatoshiLite/status/881547373901529088, So I had a visit with Alex Ao - #8 by daira

Today, the CEO of ViaBTC.com (funded by Bitmain: https://www.ccn.com/viabtc-open-bitcoin-exchange-raising-200000-funding-led-bitmain/) writes:

https://twitter.com/ProfFaustus/status/1027345654526496768

https://twitter.com/ProfFaustus/status/1020688425815617536

Some comments from Bitcoin cash developers and miners can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/967637/viabtc_ceo_haipo_yang_we_need_stop_the_regular/

Users or Miners? For me there is a huge difference.

And i personally disagree with any of the statements in the twitter poss.

I don’t think devs should work for miners, neither that miners are users, nor that miners should have a saying at all, other than giving an opinion.

In my opinion devs/teams should be the most responsible to holders/stakers/investors in first place. These are the people that make direct investments into a given project. Miners are 3rd party own profit businesses or supporters and should have the less saying/vote from all mentioned groups.

I can’t see any logic why a miner should have the biggest/only vote when it comes about devs/teams/decisions for a project.

And no matter i’am a miner my own, i would never support a project that is driven by miners, impossible.

Just my 2 cents.

don’t sell out your pow to bespoke hardware? (joking)

What is really crazy is the fallout from all this…

@zooko - does this kind of politics worry you at all? It seems to have worried the bch community.

thanks.

Protocol design is a specialised competency. Any coin needs developers and designers to work on protocol improvements. If you want to influence that process, then you either need to become competent at it yourself, or express your opinions to people who are. The Zcash devs are happy to help with answering design questions, explaining the existing protocol, etc. But I’m afraid I’m not very impressed when, as in the Litecoin case for example, people with no competence in protocol design try to weigh in from the sidelines without engaging with the technical issues.

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It seems to be happening already.

Bitmain specified the UAHF which third-party developers (whom may or may not have been funded) implemented as BitcoinABC and helped bring about Bitcoin Cash: UAHF: A contingency plan against UASF (BIP148) - blog.bitmain.com

Bitmain developers have also just released the Wormhole protocol extension, bringing tokens and smart contracts to Bitcoin Cash: http://wormhole.cash/ (English language option in top-right menu), Wormhole Project Launches — $1.2M Worth of BCH Burned So Far – Bitcoin News

Meanwhile, other not so well funded developers, have proposed rival token solutions, OP_GROUP, Simple Ledger Protocol etc. How do ordinary users decide which token solution they should support?

Things that could tip the balance, irrespective of technical merit, might be miner support and who is publicly “crowned” the winner (note: colored coin and token solutions have existed long before the competition):

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Miners and developers are meeting in Bangkok to decide the future of the Bitcoin Cash protocol (two roadmaps with different technical features, each wanting to be deployed in the November upgrade).

Bitmain even invited Vitalik.

Meanwhile, accusations are flying left…

…and right

Bitmain conspired with Blockstream and they paid a dev team called Core to enable Segwit on the now inaccurately named Bitcoin (BTC). As part of this deal it was agreed that in return for Bitmain support for Segwit in BTC that BlockStream/Core would let Bitmain and their paid Dev team Bitcoin ABC fork off with another version of Bitcoin that was in fact actually still Bitcoin. The idea was that Bitmain could use this branch of the chain as their private playground…
https://coingeek.com/fear-and-loathing-in-bangkok-calvin-ayre-inside-the-worlds-first-budding-bitcoin-hash-war/

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Can you give a little more background on this? I didn’t get into crypto until after the fork. Or maybe share an unbiased link? It sounds like Bitmain co-opted Bitcoin, but Bitcoin Cash supporters don’t sound any better to me. This seems like a great opportunity for :zcash: since it would support Satoshi’s vision on the main chain while also having BOLT which would provide a scaling solution, and even better not having it controlled by one company. Although this last point isn’t assured since ASIC’s just came out a couple of months ago. An April hard fork might not be a bad idea to make sure this doesn’t happen. However as I understand it Zcash doesn’t utilize consensus in the same way as Bitcoin.

So is Zcash susceptible to the same shenanigans as these?

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