[Frondo]

Bitcoin is absolutely anti-democratic. There's no way for users to engage with the policy decisions implied in the design.

No bitcoin advocate has ever said anything about my point other than "Just code up your alternative and get 50% of the network to adopt it," which does not mesh with any definition of democratic engagement anywhere in history, and doesn't even make sense in the context of democratic governance.

I'll just note that you didn't even say that, you just said "yes it is! yes it is so democratic!" ... which, of course, it isn't, at all.

[gnaritas]

Bitcoin is a consensus network, to call that anti-democratic is just absolutely absurd. It is the very definition of a simple democracy, whoever controls 51% of the network wins.

> Just code up your alternative and get 50% of the network to adopt it," which does not mesh with any definition of democratic engagement anywhere in history

Nonsense, winning in any democracy requires gaining the support of the majority. If your idea has merit, it'll be adopted when the majority of of the network agrees it has merit by adopting it.

[Frondo]

Thanks for trying, but that's not democracy.

"You have to code, and then you have to get your changes distributed to more than half the world" fits no definition of democratic governance ever. The two are so far removed, I'm having trouble really understanding how you can conflate the two.

But I'll be charitable, and try and make sense of it, because you seem genuine (and genuinely confused).... I guess if you take a concept like "majority rules" and interpret it to its most shallow, then you can bend what you just described up there into a kind of democracy, but democracy isn't actually that shallow an idea.

It's about the distribution of political power to the people, not just "majority rules". That's why people get to vote on things that influence them, even where they're not subject-matter experts. Your typical bitcoin user is affected by Bitcoin design decisions, but has no say in them and no means to change them.

No, "just code it and get it adopted by 51% of the network" doesn't count. That's a far, far, far higher barrier to participation than a poll tax or a literacy test, and those have been dismissed long ago as crude methods of taking democratic power away from the people.

[gnaritas]

> "You have to code, and then you have to get your changes distributed to more than half the world" fits no definition of democratic governance ever.

You don't have to code. You have to have an idea worth being coded and make enough people care that someone does it, this is no different than implementing any other idea in any kind of democracy. It's called lobbying and getting support and under no democracy is getting change into place free of effort.

It doesn't look like democracy to you because you don't want it to, nothing more nothing less, your mind is closed and you're only looking for excuses to dismiss it.

And yes, it is democracy, as a decentralized ledger, it only changes when the network by a majority agrees the change is acceptable. Choosing which split of a network to follow is voting, if your personal definition of democracy claims this isn't democracy, then your definition is wrong. It is democratic to the core, there is by definition no central authority, change happens only by mass approval.