totally agree that there doesn't need to be a single approach to soft forks, as seen with segwit and taproot using different mechanisms.

I guess what I'm getting at is that many plebs who run their own nodes don't know how to make their opinion heard in the consensus process. All I see is a cacophony of opinions online, but no sense of how popular any proposal actually is. If there was a way to gauge people's opinions of BIPs through highly visible polls I think that would be a good thing.

We need some way where a large portion or a majority of nodes/consensus participants can organize and essentially vote on soft forks, or easily start running the forks.

Polls on different platforms seem like a decent idea, but then there's issue of actually pulling the code to your node and running it.

Maybe it would be helpful if the community could somehow agree on scheduling votes or something like that, not sure.

Not super familiar with the entire process of "speedy trial" and other such soft-fork methods, so maybe those things are already kind of being handled in some way.

I feel like the soft fork process really needs better public understanding of how to participate and what mechanisms they can actually use to vote. I definitely need to go and do my own research...

This is also linked right above every text field for posting and commenting.

Make War Unaffordable

credit to https://streetcyber.store/

This is the kind of stuff I'm talking about. We need more of this.

Bitcoiners should be able to rally around a shared cause and make sure that people know why it's so important.

Links from the site: The Benefits of Bitcoin Mining Advocacy Tools

I agree that it will hurt the U.S. But collectively they don't see that. So they might end up shooting themselves in the foot and going down the route that leads to less people being able to use bitcoin freely.

I'm sure most people here would like to be able to use bitcoin without the threat of the state coming down on them no? Yes, bitcoin still works even with totalitarian governments, but if we want bitcoin to be as accessible as possible to as many people as possible we need to make sure that governments aren't cracking down on it and that people have a different view of it culturally.

Winning over the minds of the people matters way more than bitcoiners think IMO. We don't want Bitcoin to be a niche technology that is only used as a last resort to overcome tyrannical authoritarianism, we want it to be understood and accepted by as many people and governments as possible.

I want to see Bitcoin be accepted in the United States by both the people and the government. Regulations cracking down on the industry makes bitcoin less available to the people there.

Sure cracking down on bitcoin won't actually kill bitcoin, but it significantly affects people's ability to use it freely without the concern of the boot of the Feds.

Most people will not use bitcoin if it is not convenient or if there is a threat of the state coming down on them. Only in the case where they have no other choice, would most people resort to using bitcoin IMO.

100% support lightsats!

According to mempool.space, I believe the record highs for fees are somewhere ~1400 sats/vByte, from back in Dec 2017.

Thank you very much for the info. This is a rabbit hole worth going down.

I've seen controversy about censorship with covenants and similar proposals, but I don't know enough to be super opinionated.

Nice post. Without going into too much detail on each of your questions:

I think that decentralization is absolutely a core principle of bitcoin if not the most important principle. Money under the control of central groups / authority has always shown to be corrupted.

If you mean that as a network becomes more decentralized people trust it more, In general I'd agree.

Decentralization is the key to censorship resistance.

I wish.

My question:

Do some protocols work better with less decentralization / (more centralization)? If so what types of protocols would require less or more?

This is exactly the kind of discussion that I was trying to get at with this post.

Basically all cryptocurrencies just market themselves off of the things that make Bitcoin genuinely useful and ditch them when it suits them.

Yeah I don't understand how people can get past the ICO, nobody has ever given me a solid answer about that. I wonder how the transition to PoS will play out over time.

I totally agree about the CEOs, marketing, and foundations being the antithesis of decentralization. People still seem to try to argue that it's decentralized though, I just wanted to hear peoples thoughts.

I see a lot of ETH heads moving the goal posts saying that it's decentralized enough to do what it needs to do but I'm not so sure.

Agreed

I love Matt Kratter

Don't non-mining nodes contribute towards consensus? I mean isn't that how user activated soft forks work? My understanding is that in 2017 non-mining nodes essentially voted against the majority of miners to activate the SegWit soft fork.

I think it depends on what type of security you are talking about. Obviously non-mining nodes don't contribute towards double-spend / 51% attack resistance, but they do certainly have influence over the network, in a way securing the protocol from centralized changes.

I definitely agree that multiple nodes controlled by one person doesn't help secure the network any more than running a single node.