GavinAndresen's AMA, about voting in a PoW system and more

[Sabreiib]

The event has taken place in Chinese forum 8BTC.

http://8btc.com/thread-31877-6-1.html

GavinAndresen: Agreeing how the vote would work would be hard (would transactions vote? For how long? 51% agreement or 75% or 95%?) Only transactions in blocks count as voting? (if not, then somebody could send lots of transactions to vote multiple times) And what if miners decide not to mine transactions that vote for something they disagree with?

[Sabreiib]

GavinAndresen: I think most of the interesting things you can do with Ethereum you can also do with multi-signature Bitcoin transactions. I haven’t seen a really great use of Ethereum yet, and I think there will be a big problem with Ethereum smart contracts that are designed to steal people’s money, because very few people will have the skill necessary to tell if a complicated smart contract is correct.

My guess is all of the “blockchain for everything” excitement will die down in a year or two and a lot of people will be disappointed.

Then a few years later there will be blockchains for everything, running quietly inside stock markets and currency exchanges and lots of other places. Some of them will use the Bitcoin blockchain, some of them won’t, and nobody besides blockchain engineers will care much.

Throughout it all, I think it is most likely Bitcoin continues to grow, hopefully with less drama as it gets bigger and more mature.

[Sabreiib]

GavinAndresen: I am skeptical that crowd-funding software development can work well; if I look at other successful open source software projects, they are usually funded by companies, not individuals.

(B&C,Nu are companies, LOL)

[Sentinelrv]

GavinAndresen: I am skeptical that crowd-funding software development can work well; if I look at other successful open source software projects, they are usually funded by companies, not individuals.

(B&C,Nu are companies, LOL)

Sounds like he’s really behind the times. Nu & B&C’s decentralized governance makes it possible to pay developers without crowd-funding from supporters and that functionality has been available since September 2014.

[Sabreiib]

GavinAndresen:1.The experience of the last two consensus changes is that miners very quickly switch once consensus reaches 75% – the last soft fork went from 75% support to well over 95% support in less than one week. So I’m very confident that miners will all upgrade once the 75% threshold is reached, and BIP109 gives them 28 days to do so. No miner wants to create blocks that will not be accepted by the network.

(I think B&C minting price is very low, as low as a Raspbeery Pi, so some miners don’t care much about the upgrade because they pay little power bill, however, we should setup a 55% threshold ASAP.)