Process for Decision Making and Innovation for ETC

His IOHK team, including his CTO, lead engineers such as Brian McKenna, and one of the scientists, got up before dawn for a meeting he understood would cover the checkpointing solution for Ethereum Classic.

The meeting turned out to be billed as a filter session covering not just the checkpointing ECIP due the following Wednesday but also changing ETC's consensus algorithm and alternative systems like PirlGuard and VeriBlock, with no one present to represent those ideas.

Instead of just complaining about the meeting, he proposes a fairer decision making process, arguing that the process behind a decision matters more than the decision itself.

The first stage of any ECIP should build shared understanding through a presentation, audio or video, of what the proposer is trying to accomplish and how.

That understanding phase should include extensive question and answer, not to kill the proposal but so critics grasp it as deeply as the person proposing it.

The second stage is practicality: whether a change needs a hard fork or substantial code rewrites and how much complexity it adds.

Switching from Ethereum style accounts to extended UTXO is impractical since every smart contract would need rewriting, unless a system runs both models at once via a device like Chimeric Ledgers.

The third stage is philosophical: is the proposed change actually a good idea, which is where community member Donald's disagreements with him over simplicity versus complexity in ETC come in.

Before opinions form, fact finding should ask whether an idea has already succeeded or failed elsewhere and whether a formal paper, specification, or existing code backs it up.

In the ETC treasury debate, ETC Labs jumped straight to the philosophical stage, calling the proposal against ETC's values in a blog post before any ECIP or conversation had even happened.

Code is law says nothing about monetary policy, since ETC already changed its own supply cap and mining rewards away from what Vitalik originally set.

He wants ETC's values spelled out as specifically as Donald states his, using RandomX versus SHA-3 as the test case, since that meeting produced no answer beyond confirming there is no vote.

Choosing an ASIC friendly algorithm raises supply chain questions about whether one company can monopolize production, since a five to ten million dollar barrier to entry needs a firm like IOHK while a quarter million dollar barrier lets an individual take the risk.

ASIC resistant algorithms are more inclusive since anyone with a laptop or graphics card can mine, though that openness raises the risk of botnets and volatile hash rate; an ASIC buyer, by contrast, is so vested in the coin's success that the sunk hardware cost gives ASIC mining an endogenous, almost proof-of-stake-like security.

The final stage is alternatives: a decision should hold at least two or three real options, such as SHA-3, SHA-256, or Scrypt, since a single option kills the conversation.

Good governance exists to protect diversity of thought so that anyone who volunteers the time to write an ECIP gets a fair, uncensored hearing.

ETC needs to make its implicit values explicit, since unresolved philosophical differences, not technical disagreement, are what actually drive hard forks like the DAO split from Ethereum.

A cryptocurrency is an encapsulation of values, so proposing a Bitcoin supply increase to 22 million coins or a Bitcoin move to proof of stake gets rejected on values alone, not technical merit.

ETC Labs asserting it knows ETC's values in a blog post, without any process to debate them, leaves him worried there is no good resolution ahead for questions like RandomX versus SHA-3.

The checkpointing proposal makes ETC immune to 51 percent attacks by adding a federated backup system, moving the chain from one source of truth to many, with the quorum possibly rotated using the NIPoPoWs concept.

Checkpointing is opt-in, unlike proof of work's opt-out default, letting exchanges choose the checkpointed chain for protection against 51 percent attacks.

Audio only meetings are unfair to non-English speaking parts of the ETC community, including Chinese speaking members, since written proposals at least allow translation.

Good governance lets creative alternatives multiply, as it did in ETC's early monetary policy debate between a deflationary, Bitcoin style capped supply and a persistently inflationary one.

The treasury proposal itself is agnostic to monetary policy and fits either the current supply cap or an expanded one.

His team came prepared with a 30 minute video, a slide deck, working code, and a planned demo of recovering from a 51 percent attack, plus discussion of porting checkpointing beyond the Mantis client to Geth or Besu.

They were given five minutes on an agenda lumping a 51 percent attack fix in with major philosophical questions about who controls the system, even though his team, newly returned to ETC, admits it still needs to catch up on implementation details.

Filtering proposals without a vote is itself a form of voting, and the meeting's refusal to discuss philosophy or values at all makes the filtering process meaningless to him.

Being against something is only a preference, not a philosophy, and good governance should make people feel heard even when they lose the argument, unlike the meeting's mixup that left his team waiting in the wrong channel.

He points to Cardano's own six months of work on its CIP process and the Voltaire project, built with partners Submittable and IdeaScale, as a model for building consensus, even among the losing side.

Without good governance, ETC risks a contentious split like Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, and he thinks the current filtering process cannot support a real roadmap or trailblazing innovation.

He announces ECIPs for the treasury and checkpointing due the following Wednesday, plus a video demonstrating recovery from a 51 percent attack, and invites the PirlGuard and VeriBlock teams to present their alternatives too.

IOHK is not wedded to its own checkpointing solution over rival proposals and would be happy to adopt PirlGuard or VeriBlock instead if their implementation and security model hold up.

He urges ETC community members not to feel censored but to use their own channels, promising to retweet their content even when he disagrees, closing with a warning that the current process is too reactive to make ETC actually innovative.