Proposal: Forking ERCs from EIPs Repository

This proposal will result in even less eyeballs on important EIP decisions, which could be catastrophic. And therefore it must be rejected.

EIPs are already accepted, implemented, and “decided” on with minimal community involvement. A recent consensus change was decided by only Ethereum Foundation and announced on Ethereum.org blog with an effective date of +24 hours. Imagine if that change received even less attention than it already did and was announced even MORE last minute (like one hour before change). That would be catastrophic.

Now that the merge is complete, decisions are centralized even further. Every upgrade decision is held ransom with a cut-throat mechanism… because forking is no longer possible. Or to be specific, forking now costs each validator USD 50,000 to support. (To caveat here and avoid confusion, using a new network ID/chain ID is not a fork, it is a new product.)

Now that we have established EIPs are not receiving enough attention, let’s please accept the fact that ERCs are more popular, get more press and more attention than EIPs. Because they are written by individuals writing applications and are easier to understand. This is the creator economy working!

Alternate proposal

So here is an alternate proposal that still allows people who don’t care about ERCs from having to see them:

  1. Create a new RSS feed and button on eips.ethereum.org.
  2. When you subscribe on that feed (or the associated email list, yes we need an email list) you will not be bothered with ERCs.

Tenets

We are one community. ERCs/EIPs are ETHEREUM IMPROVEMENT proposals. As in the whole community—the clients, the applications, the JSON RPC, we even have proposals for how to make proposals and a proposal explaining that you shouldn’t use a certain opcode while not removing that opcode. All of these things are in one sandbox with one community. And so our IMPROVEMENT proposals should live together. In the end, we are all improving the same thing.

4 Likes