On Tuesday, February 02, 2016 11:28:40 PM Dave Scotese wrote: > How about "defining" (rules, code, etc.) Such code and rules define what > bitcoin is. It does require consensus and it ends up being a concord, but > all that can come after the fact (just as it did after bitcoin was first > released to the public).
The difficulty is that this BIP needs to refer to three different context of consensus: 1. Consensus (stated) among developers for changes in the BIP Process. 2. Economic consensus (potential and stated) to veto a soft-fork by an intended "firing" of the set of miners if they choose to enforce it. 3. (Actual) consensus in economic adoption of changed rules, to determine the success of a hard-fork (after the fact). 4. The set of rules currently established as (defining) Bitcoin, enforced by an (actual) consensus of economically-relevant nodes. Context 3 can be disambiguated with "adoption consensus", and context 4 with "consensus rules" and/or "consensus protocol", but I don't see a clear solution that covers all four contexts, and even sharing the word "consensus" for them may be confusing. In addition, usage of the word "consensus" for context 4 has proven confusing to users. For example, recently users misinterpreted the "Consensus" label used in context 4 as implying that the idea itself had in fact achieved consensus among some group of decision-makers (similar to context 1, but not necessarily the group being "developers"). I don't know a good way to make this completely clear, so suggestions are more than welcome. Luke _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
