Bitcoin Cash [BCH] community member proposes to add a different governance model

On 15th September, a Bitcoin Cash community member on the Subreddit r/btc posted about the possibility of adding a new governance system in the coin’s mechanism. As stated by the user [BTC_StKN], the proposal is supposed to help Bitcoin Cash in the implementation of new features and upgrades. The post was titled ‘Bitcoin Cash Governance Model improvements’.

In the post, StKN began by stating that the community’s opposition against the miner voting seems to be stalling the project. In the past, miner’s vote proved to be a huge governance failure for the Bitcoin network after SegWit2x was proposed. A mining pool called F2Pool withdrew its support from SegWit2X, giving the proposal a major fallback.

Regarding the incident, the Reddit user said that the past failure is one of the reasons why the community does not trust the governance system of the miner’s voting. Furthermore, several members feel that miner voting pre-fork does not represent the true intent of the miner, he stated. According to StKN, a single failure does not break the usefulness of voting. The post further read:

“Due to the above, some feel Hashrate alone is the only Governance mechanism, but contentious hashrate fork battles should be the ultimate last resort. This has been a repeated, disruptive problem for Bitcoin based blockchains. There should be another option.”

The subsequent text also stated that the success of each Bitcoin fork is decided by the users through the coin’s price in an open market. This, StKN connected with hashrate and stated that price and hashrate, both go hand in hand. Therefore, he made a point mentioning that a network can reach its fall despite the miners having 51% or more of the network hashrate, if the users and the market price do not cooperate.

In the last bit of the post, StKN suggested the implementation of a new governance model for Bitcoin Cash and its road ahead. The conclusion included:

“Possible solutions: // Coin Holder Voting, which cannot be falsified. Coin Holder voting in support of development proposals could be the closest pre-fork indicator of community Market Pricing support. // Or some other type of stakeholder voting model?”

Earlier this month, the CEO of CoinEx, Haipo Yang also suggested a similar approach in the development of Bitcoin Cash. According to Yang, the community should form a standard organization. He also mentioned Bitcoin Cash Improvement Proposal [BCIP], wherein one can introduce a proposal on certain criteria for the betterment of the network.