There is the feeling of "rough consensus" and the idea that it's harder to game or control a thing when there is no clear process. And both those things are good.
So I don't think there needs to be an "official soft fork process."
There does seem to be a feeling, at least among Bitcoin core contributes who make statements about it, that they don't want to be deciding which forks to pursue.
Francis's tweet got some interesting responses. It's worth poking around the thread on twitter.
17 sats \ 1 reply \ @Rock 11 Apr
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.
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Good point. At the moment, it does feel like you have to wait for someone to produce a patch that you can run. If there isn't one, it doesn't seem like you can do much beyond adding to the cacophony.
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