MIT Panel: Democracy Is Antithetical to What Bitcoin Represents

By April 27, 2016Bitcoin Business

Day one of last month’s MIT Bitcoin Expo featured a panel discussion on various improvements to Bitcoin that are either currently in the works or already deployed on the network. Participants on the panel were Blockstream mathematician Andrew Poelstra , Blockstream Core Tech Engineer Mark Friedenbach , Lightning Network co-creator Joseph Poon and Bitcoin Core contributor Jonas Schnelli .

During the Q&A portion of the panel, an audience member asked the participants to share their opinions on the previous presentation, in which the World Bitcoin Network ’s James D’Angelo posited the idea of replacing Bitcoin’s proof-of-work with elected individuals who would be trusted with mining blocks . The panel seemed generally bearish on D’Angelo’s proposal. Generally, the panel disagreed with the idea of turning Bitcoin into a democratically controlled currency.

Bitcoin Is Not a Democracy

Friedenbach was the first to respond to the audience member’s question, and he made a point of directly taking on the idea of Bitcoin as a democratically controlled currency. He noted: “Bitcoin is not a democracy. It was never designed to be a democracy. Democracy is antithetical to what Bitcoin represents, which is consensus even in the face of mob-rule voting the other way.” The idea that changes to Bitcoin should be governed democratically has been popularized by some supporters of Bitcoin Classic . Most notably, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has referred to hard forks as elections.

Bitcoin Runs on Consensus

Friedenbach went on to explain that any change to the consensus algorithm in Bitcoin that does not have universal support from nodes will result in a fork. He added, “That is as user-protecting as it is scary when things break.”

In Friedenbach’s view, the difficulties associated with making changes to Bitcoin’s consensus rules are what make the system valuable in the first place. He stated: […]

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