Jonas Schnelli on Why Elected Officials May Not Be Good for Bitcoin

By April 14, 2016Bitcoin Business

Bitcoin Core contributor Jonas Schnelli was recently featured in a panel discussion about improvements to Bitcoin at the 2016 MIT Bitcoin Expo . During the Q&A portion of the panel, an audience member asked the participants about the previous presentation by the World Bitcoin Network ’s James D’Angelo in which he articulated the idea of replacing miners with elected officials.

In general, the panel, which also featured Blockstream core tech engineer Mark Friedenbach , Blockstream mathematician Andrew Poelstra and Lightning Network co-creator Joseph Poon , had a negative reaction to the concept of using democracy to handle changes to Bitcoin’s consensus rules . Schnelli used his experience with direct democracy in Switzerland to make his points.

Voting Requires an Informed Public

Although Schnelli has a positive take on Switzerland’s use of direct democracy, he does not view the system as a useful option for Bitcoin. In his view, the intricate, technical details of Bitcoin make direct democracy a poor choice for governance. Schnelli explained:

“Voting or democracy is good, but I live in Switzerland ‒ one of the only countries where we have direct democracy ‒ and with democracy you need to understand the topic you’re going to vote about. Who is able to vote about Bitcoin technical topics? Even the miners ‒ they don’t really get the technical essence of the problem.”

Indeed, many representatives of Bitcoin’s network hashrate have decided to default to Bitcoin Core on development issues. Although there is widespread support for a 2-megabyte block size limit among Chinese exchanges and mining pools, those companies are, as of now, willing to accept that change only if it comes from Bitcoin Core.

On the topic of voting on changes to the Bitcoin protocol, Schnelli added:

“Voting means you really need to fully understand what you’re going to vote about. As soon […]

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