Ethereum's Dialogue Divide Is Slowing Answers to Its Toughest Questions

Not only are developers divided, but the wider community also seemed splintered on the subject, with a "Coin-voting" website - a web page that enables ethereum users to vote on topics based on the number of ether coins they have - showing a nearly even distribution of those for and against.

"You can't create a governance process without actively involving all participants," Péter Szilágyi, an ethereum core developer, told CoinDesk.

While the mob mentality that proliferates on social media can be an effective way of getting your voice heard, it tends to silence subtler arguments and it's unclear whether these mobs are even ethereum users, much less real people.

"Who knows how many multiple usernames one party is using," Tyson told CoinDesk, asking, "And does that person even represent an ethereum community member?".

Used to try and clear some of the opaqueness up, coin-voting has become another way of measuring ethereum community sentiment.

For one, ethereum communication officer Hudson Jameson has migrated the ethereum GitHub repository onto a dedicated webpage that highlights the various code proposals in a more accessible manner.

Member of the ethereum magicians Lane Rettig has also expressed his commitment to better communicating the processes of ethereum governance in a blog post, stating that his vision of ethereum is as ruled by "Rational, constructive, well-intentioned, economically incentivized human beings brought together by selfish and selfless inclinations alike."

At the ethereum educational conference EDCON this week, Rettig has organized a workshop where he hopes to break down the network's governance basics and the philosophical assumptions behind these mechanisms.

Because ethereum developers are looking to change the consensus mechanism of the protocol to proof-of-stake, eliminating proof-of-work mining, Van de Sande suggests sending all future ether issuance to a smart contract, which acts as a kind of insurance policy for the community.

"We don't have the answers to these questions. But I hope that as a community we can begin to understand the questions and define the answers."