Egalitarian Society or Benevolent Dictatorship: The State of - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Egalitarian Society or Benevolent Dictatorship: The State of Cryptocurrency Governance

Sarah Azouvi, Mary Maller, and Sarah Meiklejohn University College London

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BITCOIN’18

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What is decentralization?

Rules enforced by miners Rules set by creators

?

[Gencer et al. FC’18] [Gervais et al. 2013]

Motivation

Governance

• Open source
• Anyone can participate (Pull requests)
• Improvement proposals
• No voting

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I cannot grant EIP status to this proposal, for not being "in keeping with the Ethereum philosophy."

Our contribution

Our contribution

• Number of authors per file
• Number of comments
• Number of IPs

Contribution to code base

1 2 3 4 5+ Number of authors Fraction of files 0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0 Bitcoin Bitcoin ABC Clojure Ethereum Ethereum Classic Rust

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24% of single-authored files written by Wladimir van Der Laan

(7% of all the files) 36% single-authored files written by Tomasz Drwiega (20% of the files)

Ethereum more centralized

Commenters in the code base

Commenters in the code base

Number of comments per author

Ethereum discussion more decentralised

Improvement proposals

1 4 7 11 16 21 26 31 36 41 46 51 56 61 Participant ID Number of IPs 2 4 6 8 10 12 Final Replaced Active Withdrawn Deferred Proposed BIP num allocated Rejected Draft

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 Participant ID Number of IPs 2 4 6 8 10 12 Accepted Draft Final Deferred

Vitalik Buterin Gavin Andresen Pieter Wuille

Diversity of Communities

Similar Non Similar

Summary

• Codebase: Ethereum more centralized
• Bitcoin more contributors (older)
• Ethereum discussion more decentralised
• New people in forks
• Similar to others open-source project

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Conclusion and Future Work

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Questions ?