Decentralization and governance

Some of you may be wondering why we are covering governance in a blockchain book. After all, aren't blockchain networks supposed to be decentralized, and thus guarded against the control of a single entity? While this is true from a technology perspective, the reality is that we are human, and for an enterprise-grade blockchain network to succeed, there are a lot of decisions that need to be made throughout the life cycle of the network.

Even bitcoin, the decentralized, anonymous, permissionless network, must deal with important and hard decisions. A case in point is the controversy around bitcoin block size. In the early days of bitcoin, a limit of 1 MB was set on the block size. As the network scaled up, this limit became problematic. Numerous proposals were issued, but the need for a consensus across the entirety of bitcoin nodes made the change difficult to agree on. This debate started in 2015, but the community had to wait until February 2018 for a partial...