@Erik
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can we all agree that this verbal and social wrangling and chest pounding seems, right now, to remain the best system of achieving consensus? or can we do better?
I would love to see more people interested in discussing this. Social wrangling is certainly the best we have, but is it the best we can do? Certainly a certain amount of discussion and back and forth is necessary to come to consensus, but it would be nice to have a discussion and come to a consensus on things like the minimum things required to decided consensus is for something (the absence of which makes it obvious that consensus is currently against), and the maximum amount of things required after which it would be clear and obvious that consensus for something has been achieved.
> wallet votes (sign a message signalling... ), can cause centralization pressures
I'm curious to know why you think this is the case. If you mean that centralization of custody is a problem for this, I very much agree. However, I don't see how having wallet votes would incentivize centralization of custody. Rather the opposite actually - one more reason to self-custody.
Regardless, I wouldn't suggest having wallet *votes* per se. I would doubt we'd get a high enough response rate on that to really determine what broader consensus of coin-owners is. However, if we had coin-weighted polling, it would I think be a very useful signal by which we could determine something (to some degree of uncertainty) about what consensus is among that group (of coin owners who take the poll).
Theoretically, the economic majority of bitcoin holders can direct the majority of mining power, and can control where the current chain goes (of course not discounting the ability of the economic minority to hard fork away if they want, taking a proportional minority amount of mining power with them).
One could also think of it like Polybius's three part government, where the parts in bitcoin would be: developers, miners, and holders. Perhaps a consensus among all of them should be ideally sought after for a smooth upgrade. Because of the blocksize wars, many think miners should simply act as a machine to implement the will of the bitcoiners. However, I think people sometimes forget that miners are also bitcoiners and they have a unique and important perspective. If the opinions and interests of miners is already adequately considered as part of our chaotic discussions on what consensus is, then great. If not, it would seem that the miner signaling process is a reasonable place for miners to decide to delay and force more discussion. While its unlikely the average user knows much about the technical aspects of consensus changes, the fact is that there are many non-developer stakeholders, and it would I think be a very beneficial achievement to figure out a way to incorporate those stakeholders into the process of determining consensus on the most important changes to bitcoin: consensus changes.