Decred Realized Disputes in Blockchain Projects Were Inevitable: Joshua Buirski
January 30, 2019 by Jon Southurst
It’s inevitable that disputes will arise over a cryptocurrency project’s direction, says Decred’s APAC outreach director Joshua Buirski. In this interview with Bitsonline‘s George Levy, he describes how Decred learned from the early Bitcoin development days and why it made a built-in governance mechanism a fundamental part of its code.
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Buirski: All Stakeholders Should Have a Say
Bitcoin’s ideological disputes, which have resulted in contentious hard forks and at least three cryptocurrencies (so far) claiming to be the “true Bitcoin”, were easy to predict, Buirski says.
“The early Decred developers were experiencing these problems on a day-to-day basis. So it wasn’t really that they thought ‘this is a problem that might arise,’ they were experiencing it first hand very early on. They had the foresight to realize this is going to be a very serious problem in the future.”
“Inevitably, fast forward four or five years, we saw that manifest itself and come to fruition in the form of Bitcoin Cash and all these other contentious chain splits.”
Decred’s solution was to build a hybrid proof-of-work/proof-of-stake mechanism, with a public proposal platform built onto its blockchain. Buirski explains that in a pure proof-of-work system like Bitcoin’s, just one stakeholder group (miners) holds all the decision-making power. There are, however, several other stakeholders who contribute to a project’s future in their own ways — and they must have a voice.
A more detailed look at how Decred does this is in this earlier Bitsonline interview, also at the North American Bitcoin Conference.
‘New Type of Organizational Structure’
Buirski also explains that Decred isn’t just a cryptocurrency, it’s “a new type of organizational structure” in which anyone can play a part and even be rewarded for it, with a low barrier to entry.
Interest in Decred is growing in the Asia-Pacific region, which he is aiding by organizing meetups everywhere from Singapore to Australia, and everywhere in between. Watch the interview above to hear the whole story.
Do you find Decred interesting? What do you think of its structure? Let’s hear your thoughts in the comments.
Images and video via Bitsonline, George Levy
