@Felipe
> the consensus should follow the current line: discussions and tests carried out by experts. We all know that the most important devs have the most weight in discussions. And that's how it should be
We have up til this point been miraculously lucky that the vast majority of prominent bitcoin developers are in relative alignment on the big picture philosophy and have all seemed to be honest and open in general. However, we cannot rely on this era of philosopher kings to continue. Relying on experts in this way is an enormous attack vector. It should not be the "most important" devs who carry the most weight, but weight should be carried by the logic of what is being said. The speaker should ideally not matter in consensus building. So I agree with Keagan's implication that this is not how bitcoin should govern itself. We should move away from appeals to authority towards something more amorphous and difficult to control.
@Jeremy
> if there were a way to sign with a NUMS point for ring signature purposes
Do you have any link you could point to about NUMS points? I assume this would be a way to aggregate coin-weighted signals in a way that helps hide who signaled in what direction?
> if NUMS points are common these ring signatures protocols might not be too useful for collecting signals
I'm curious: why is it better if its less common? I'm used to privacy properties increasing as the privacy technique used becomes more common.
@Erik
> it doesn't address the "what about people who don't know there's a vote going on"
> how nonexperts can "have a say" when they simply don't understand the relevant issues.
I think a useful way to think about this is in terms of preferences and representation, rather than in the terms of coming to the best technical solution. The fact of the matter is that value is subjective and therefore there is no "best" technical solution all the time. Sometimes the preferences of stakeholders must be weighed and a compromise come to. Hopefully most of these kinds of compromises can happen in the free market on upper layers. But certainly some of them happen on the consensus layer.
An expert with deep knowledge can deeply understand a design or change well enough to come to a full opinion about it according to their preferences. But even other experts might not have read enough about a thing, or just don't have time to delve deeply into that particular aspect. They'll have to rely partly on their ability to make a determination from partial knowledge and their ability to evaluate the trustworthiness and skill of those who have deeper knowledge than them. Nonexperts and non-technical people have to rely on those kinds of things even more so. Many people only have social signals to rely on. What do the people they trust say?
I believe that the truth gets out eventually. Those who have deep knowledge will eventually convince those who don't, tho that may take a long time to play out. As annoying as the twitterati is, I think we should get used to needing to give their opinions a bit of weight in terms of measuring consensus. Of course, we shouldn't be making technical decisions based on what nontechnical people want or think, however, what we should do is make sure that we are explaining the changes we propose to make clearly enough that a certainly level of comfort diffuses into the social circles of people who care about bitcoin but don't understand it at a technical enough level to participate in technical decision making. At a certain point, if not enough people are comfortable with a change, the change shouldn't be made yet until enough people are convinced its probably safe and probably good. Think of the large set of non-technical people to be a glue that connects together otherwise unconnected pockets of wisdom.
Doing things this way would almost certainly lead to slower development. But development of the consensus layer slowing over time should be what we all expect, and I daresay what we should all want eventually.
> it will just be a poll of "people who pay attention to the dev list and maybe some irc rooms"
Maybe. But if there were mechanisms for broader consensus measuring, perhaps more would pay attention. Perhaps some way to affect change would lead more to have discussions and participate.
Even if its a small group at first, I think it would be very useful information to see both who explicitly supports something, who explicitly is against something, and also who is paying attention but neutral (maybe even actively signaling as "neutral').
> unless there's a great ux around the tooling my guess is that it won't garner a lot of meaningful data:
I agree. Tooling would be very important here.