Could you elaborate more on how a blockchain will allow clients to influence the direction of the API and also keep other clients up to date on new API changes? That seems a lot more complex than the way you're putting it.
It varies a lot from network to network. You're right: it is very, very complex.
Politics and governance are topics that are, I think, a bit broad for a post in a reply on HN.
Suffice it to say that groups of dedicated people, either as loose alliances or as tightly controlled development teams, come together and make proposals for change, implement those proposals, and then push them to a network. If the network as a whole thinks it is in their interests to use it, it gets voted on and enabled. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. Mostly it is entirely transparent to users. Rarely it causes a fork in a network (basically a civil war) where infrastructure providers decided to part ways and go on to support two child networks instead of one.
It's messy, as all democracies are. I think it is a beautiful process, and it has taught me a lot of valuable lessons about how groups really work, what politics really is, and how to convince people who do not want to be convinced because you believe in something fiercely.
Open networks take a lot of the best parts of FOSS and bring them to life in a way that I never thought I'd experience so intensely.
Politics and governance are topics that are, I think, a bit broad for a post in a reply on HN.
Suffice it to say that groups of dedicated people, either as loose alliances or as tightly controlled development teams, come together and make proposals for change, implement those proposals, and then push them to a network. If the network as a whole thinks it is in their interests to use it, it gets voted on and enabled. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. Mostly it is entirely transparent to users. Rarely it causes a fork in a network (basically a civil war) where infrastructure providers decided to part ways and go on to support two child networks instead of one.
It's messy, as all democracies are. I think it is a beautiful process, and it has taught me a lot of valuable lessons about how groups really work, what politics really is, and how to convince people who do not want to be convinced because you believe in something fiercely.
Open networks take a lot of the best parts of FOSS and bring them to life in a way that I never thought I'd experience so intensely.