Alex Van de Sande makes a compelling case against chain splits, specifically in the case of a platform like Ethereum because of the downsides for applications it hosts. The conclusion I made from this was that it’s critical for Ethereum’s success to have a governance process that’s seen as politically legitimate and can make recommendations well before the need to rely on a fork to make the decision for us. It’s impossible to make everyone happy, but what would be great to see is something that we can point to when some issue is dragged up and can say (with support from most people) “look, people had their say on this”. To me, political legitimacy boils down to identifying key stakeholder groups and querying them individually on matters. The groups as I can see them, and suggestions for how they might weight their votes, might be:
- ETH holders (coin vote)
- Projects (weighted by token market share?)
- Core developers/devs (weighted by commits? or just 1:1 i’m sure they can work something out)
- Users, community members (weighted 1:1 using a system with some anti-sybil property like r/recdao?)
- Miners/validators
- EEA members
We don’t need to have a formal, on-chain process, but improving an informal one could be a boost for the community. It would be great to be able to make decisions in a more expeditious and resolute way.