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 BITCOIN’18 1

What is decentralization? Rules set by creators Rules enforced by miners ? [Gencer et al. FC’18] [Gervais et al. 2013] 2

Motivation

Governance • Open source • Anyone can participate (Pull requests) • Improvement proposals • No voting 4

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 Ethereum more centralized 1.0 Bitcoin Bitcoin ABC 0.8 Clojure Ethereum Ethereum Classic Fraction of files 0.6 Rust 0.4 0.2 0.0 1 2 3 4 5+ Number of authors 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) 9

Commenters in the code base

Commenters in the code base Number of comments Ethereum discussion per author more decentralised

Improvement proposals Gavin Andresen Pieter Wuille Vitalik Buterin 12 Final 12 Accepted Replaced Draft 10 Active Final 10 Withdrawn Deferred Deferred 8 Number of IPs Number of IPs Proposed 8 BIP num allocated 6 Rejected 6 Draft 4 4 2 2 0 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 1 4 7 11 16 21 26 31 36 41 46 51 56 61 Participant ID Participant ID

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 14

Conclusion and Future Work 15

Questions ?