This report was originally posted on Matrix / Slack / Discord but I was asked to repost it here.
some of you have asked me for a summary of the Ethfinex Governance Summit that took place in Switzerland last weekend. I have Live-Posted several presentations / panel discussions on Twitter, if you are interested in those please check out my Twitter timeline.
about the conference itself: attendees were mainly people from the Ethereum ecosystem since it was an Ethfinex event. some people were bit/ethfinex employees, others were investors, traders, but I've also met founders and developers. all in all a pretty diverse set of people. I could see that a lot of money was pumped into this Summit (more than necessary).
presentations were mostly done by ICO projects and the Ethfinex team. some projects that were interesting from a governance perspective were Colony, DAOstack and Aragon. one that I liked (and tweeted about) was from a EU MEP, talking about the sentiment of blockchain in the EU institutions.
the panel discussions were one of the most interesting part of this conference. I tried to post the two panel discussions on Twitter, but I realized there is way too much going on for me to capture it all, so I'll add some details here. first of all it was an interesting experience to see Vlad Zafmir or Dean Eigenmann in action, after interacting with them via Twitter and Medium. they both recognized me from Twitter, so it was fun to meet them in meat space and talk about governance face to face.
it turns out that much of the "hate" towards on-chain governance can be explained by the difference between Digital currencies and Smart contract platforms. Bitcoin and Decred fall in the first category, Ethereum, EOS or Tezos fall in the second. the reason why on-chain governance works well for Decred is because it's simply about money. users and holders are relatively aligned there. for Ethereum, holders (speculators & ICO treasuries) and users (app developers, vendors, consumers) are much less aligned. there is also the problem of smart contracts themselves, which are often poorly written and might break under new consensus rules. this makes coin voting and automatic upgrades of the chain problematic for Ethereum, hence the negative perspective of on-chain governance. another factor that adds to this view, is that the Ethereum competition is big on governance, so the Ethereum people (much like Bitcoin maximalists) praise immutability and robustness of their blockchain. they do not dismiss governance at all, but they do have their reasons to paint it as a bad thing (or at least until they have found a satisfying solution in place).
in the end, we all have the same goal: building a decentralized world and promoting freedom and autonomy. for this reason, I'm confident that the future of Decred is bright. I have chatted with several attendees (both bitfinex employees, investors, founders and devs) and all of them were impressed by Decred's past, present and future. if you have any further questions about the event, feel free to ask them here, or send me a direct message on Matrix
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