The following opinion piece was written by Jonald Fyookball.
In parts 1 and 2 of How Bitcoin Cash …, we uncovered the important principles of community education and clarity. Now it is time to turn our attention to one of the most obvious things that went wrong in BTC — the centralization of protocol development.
Also read: How Bitcoin Cash Can Avoid the Same Mistakes as Bitcoin Core, Part 2
How Bitcoin Cash Can Avoid Centralization
Decentralization comes in many forms: decentralization of nodes, mining pools, wealth, and so on. One thing that was overlooked for a long time in Bitcoin BTC was that while many things were well distributed, there was only one main group of developers (Bitcoin Core).
Decentralized Development
Most of the BCH community is now well aware of this folly, and that is why we seek to have multiple independent teams of developers along with multiple full node implementations.
Miners need established, robust software they can rely on, and its important to have several choices; otherwise it means that a single group of developers essentially controls the protocol.
Entrenchment of “The Reference Implementation”
Bitcoin Core became entrenched as “the” Bitcoin software, which led to stagnation. Although there were already several different implementations, the dominance of Bitcoin Core has been overwhelming.
Technically, it’s hash power that matters, not how many different nodes are running a certain software… But given the totally lopsided distribution, it was clear that anyone running a different version from Core would be a tiny minority. That means Bitcoin Core calls all the shots as far as BTC protocol rules.
BCH is Doing Better Already
We’re heading in the right direction but we’re not out of the woods yet. One interesting phenomenon
