{"id":5617,"date":"2020-06-17T10:25:54","date_gmt":"2020-06-17T14:25:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cointelegraph.com\/magazine\/?p=5617"},"modified":"2020-06-17T10:54:46","modified_gmt":"2020-06-17T14:54:46","slug":"agents-of-influence-blockchain-cryptoverse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cointelegraph.com\/magazine\/2020\/06\/17\/agents-of-influence-blockchain-cryptoverse","title":{"rendered":"Agents of Influence: He Who Controls The Blockchain, Controls The Cryptoverse"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nobody is in charge of Ethereum. It suffers from a chronic lack of governance, a lack of structure.\u00a0 And as a result, it is in crisis.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

That\u2019s one theory, anyway.<\/span><\/p>\n

“Ethereum governance has failed. We are a de facto technocracy, where a small group of technocrats, the core devs, have final say over what goes into the protocol,\u201d declared former Ethereum core developer Lane Rettig recently.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cBut the challenges we face today are increasingly non-technical. Core devs don’t want to make these decisions because they feel unqualified, fear legal liability, are conflict avoidant, and prefer just to write code.\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Not all agree.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum told <\/span>Cointelegraph Magazine<\/span><\/i>: \u201cThe idea that \u2018no one is in charge\u2019 of either Bitcoin or Ethereum is fallacious. Vitalik [Buterin] is to all intents and purposes \u2018in charge\u2019 of Ethereum. The Ethereum Foundation (EF) controls its trademark and he controls the EF.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The <\/span>MIT Technology Review<\/span><\/a> said much the same in late 2018: \u201cEveryone knows that for all Ethereum\u2019s ambitions to be decentralized, [Vitalik] Buterin is still its north star. When difficult times have arisen in the past, the community has leaned heavily on him to guide them.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One recalls, too, the 2016 DAO hack, following which the key response was made by \u201ca small group of people advocating successfully for the hard fork,\u201d as law professor Michele Neitz <\/span>recounted<\/span><\/a>. She described the members of this group as Ethereum\u2019s \u201cagents of influence\u201d.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

From these recent utterances, one might assume <\/span>decentralization<\/span><\/i> is failing. Originally a political term suggesting the dispersion of powers, as from a central government to regional or local governments, decentralization has taken on a new meaning and importance in the Crypto Age. According to <\/span>MIT Technology Review<\/span><\/i><\/a>, it is \u201cthe principle, which any cryptocurrency community strives for, that no one entity or group should be in control.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Who rules Bitcoin?<\/span><\/h3>\n

Maybe Bitcoin (BTC), the first decentralized blockchain project, offers clarity. \u201cNo one owns the bitcoin system,\u201d <\/span>said<\/span><\/a> Bitcoin Core\u2019s lead \u2018maintainer\u2019 Wladimir van der Laan in a 2016 blog in which he explained why he had to remove BTC luminary Gavin Andresen’s \u2018commit access\u2019 privileges in accordance with the “<\/span>principle of least privilege<\/span><\/a>.”<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cNo one controls Bitcoin,\u201d stated Jameson Lopp in an influential blog titled <\/span>Who Controls Bitcoin Core<\/span><\/i><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

But Bitcoin has its skeptics. Its <\/span>\u201cgovernance [actually] consists in a form of domination based on charismatic authority, largely founded on presumed technical expertise, \u201d Primavera De Filippi and Benjamin Loveluck asserted in an oft-cited <\/span>paper<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Moreover, it almost belies credibility that any organization can exist over time without its internal \u2018influencers.\u2019\u00a0 Bitcoin is basically <\/span>governed by Bitcoin Core<\/span><\/a>, its software client used to access the Bitcoin network, and within Bitcoin Core there are only a handful of individuals with the ability to merge code into the master branch, so-called “maintainers.” At present there are five maintainers \u2014 holders of the PGP keys that can sign merge commits.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2018Lead maintainer\u2019 appears to be an esteemed position. Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin\u2019s creator,\u00a0 was the first lead maintainer. Gavin Andresen was the second. Van der Laan is only the third. Bitcoin has had hundreds of core developers in its twelve-year history, but over that period it has had only about a dozen \u2018maintainers\u2019 including leads. Aren\u2019t these \u2018agents of influence\u2019?<\/span><\/p>\n

Not according to Lopp, co-founder and CTO of Casa, who told us that:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhile there are a handful of GitHub \u201cmaintainer\u201d accounts at the organization level that have the ability to merge code into the master branch, this is more of a janitorial function than a position of power.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cThe question of who controls the ability to merge code changes into Bitcoin Core\u2019s GitHub repository tends to come up on a recurring basis,” noted Lopp, who argued that the question itself is a red herring “that stems from an authoritarian perspective\u200a\u2014\u200athis model does not apply to Bitcoin.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

After all, <\/span>\u201cAnyone is free to propose code changes to improve the software by opening a pull request against the master branch on bitcoin\/bitcoin.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But is it really that simple? One could argue whether Gavin Andresen deserved to lose his commit access privileges in 2016 or otherwise (\u201cGavin hadn\u2019t done anything as a maintainer for a year or so, and before that he already was hardly active for a long time,\u201d according to van der Laan), but assuming he deserved to be terminated, <\/span>someone had to do it<\/span><\/i>\u00a0 \u2014 and van der Laan wrote his blog, presumably, to justify why <\/span>he <\/span><\/i>had committed the deed.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Human politics have not been eliminated<\/span><\/h3>\n

\u201cThe [Bitcoin] development team is not autocratic,\u201d <\/span>commented <\/span><\/a>Vili Lehdonvirta, Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford<\/span>. Moreover, other parties are also influential in how Bitcoin\u2019s rules are set, including mining pools. \u201cThe point is that Bitcoin has not in any sense eliminated human politics; humans are still very much in charge of setting the rules that the network enforces.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In a recent interview, <\/span>Cointelegraph Magazine<\/span><\/i> asked Lopp <\/span>about the criticism that Bitcoin\u2019s actually \u201cconsists in a form of domination based on charismatic authority.\u201d He answered:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cDuring scaling debates we often saw these different types of arguments clashing with each other. In general I’d disagree with the characterization of debates as “domination” unless it’s being used to describe someone dominating a particular argument because the opposing side has done a poor job of defending their position with logic. At the end of the day, no one can force node operators to change the software they are running.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But surely maintainers serve more than a “janitorial function”? Else, why would Gavin Andresen be upset about losing his \u201ccommit access\u201d privilege?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cGavin Andresen appeared to not consider his role to be a janitorial function,\u201d answered Lopp. \u201cThere were points in time in which he acted more like a benevolent dictator. Unfortunately for him, it turned out that the Bitcoin Core organization did not want a benevolent dictator. I’m actually not so sure that Gavin was upset about losing commit access; he had not used it in over a year at the time it was revoked. The drama about it being revoked seemed to mostly come from other people outside of Bitcoin Core.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

With Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other decentralized blockchain projects, there seems to be this paradigm that \u201cno one is in control,\u201d that all decisions are made by consensus \u2014 and there seems to be a real reluctance that all these projects might have their internal \u2018influencer.\u2019 <\/span>\u00a0<\/span>\u201cFor a very long time these politics were not explicitly recognized,\u201d said Lehdonvirta, and many people don\u2019t recognize them, preferring instead the idea that Bitcoin is purely \u2018math-based money\u2019 and that all the developers are doing is purely apolitical plumbing work.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Is it fair to say, then, that Bitcoin may be less decentralized than most people \u2014 inside and without \u2014 believe?<\/span><\/p>\n

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