THE BIGEST BLOCKCHAIN CONSENSUS VOTE IN HISTORY GOES LIVE!

On the same day that Decred’s DCR coin supply passed the 14 million milestone, Decred also passed four consensus upgrades that will pave the way for the projects long term future.

This is a big moment for the Decred community and shows the true value and power of our decentralised governance system. If you were or still are in any doubt how important a formalised governance system is, in the blockchain / crypto currency space, this should serve as an ideal reminder and indicator.

Revert Treasury Expenditure Policy

The first consensus upgrade was the “Revert Treasury Expenditure Policy”, which is a progressive change to further decentralise the Decred treasury. The stakeholders now hold a key to vote on treasury spends, which means no funds will leave the war chest unless the stakeholders agree.

With a current value of over $40 million this is also one of the biggest transfers of wealth from a company to a decentralised entity. Company 0, has been an excellent Steward of the Decred treasury over the past 6 years and has acted with uncompromising integrity. This is shown by the amount of coins remaining in the treasury after this time, currently over 787,000 dcr. When you take into account the extremely low trading price of the coins during this time, this is even more impressive and honourable.

Explicit Version Upgrades

The second upgrade is actually pretty huge and makes Decred the first Hard Fork only blockchain. Decred’s rule set will no longer accept or process new data / transactions from nodes not running the current version of the software.

Any version of the software that hasn’t passed the consensus voting process and is not the current version of the protocol will be rejected. Note, all older transactions and data will be preserved.

Automatic Ticket Revocations

The third consensus upgrade is “Automatic Ticket Revocations”. This upgrade automates the return of funds for expired tickets. To make the stakeholder voting process even more efficient.

Currently if your ticket doesn’t vote after the 142 day staking period you have to manually revoke the ticket to regain access to your DCR funds. This upgrade does away with this and now automatically revokes tickets, once this period has ended and then unlocks the dcr funds back to the ticket holder. For non / limited technical ability people this is a massive benefit.

Change PoW/PoS Subsidy Split

The final consensus upgrade and probably the most anticipated and talked about is “Change PoW/PoS Subsidy Split”. In this upgrade, Decred reduced the block reward for miners from 60% to 10% to rebalance incentive alignment. The full block reward went from:

60% Miners, 30% Stakeholders, 10% Decred Treasury

to

10% Miners, 80% Stakeholders, 10% Decred Treasury

This change was implemented after lots of discussion, consultation and a full consensus voting process. After researching and witnessing how mining cartels were manipulating the price of the DCR coin and other proof of work projects. Decred decided that this kind of suppressing, centralised behaviour was undesirable and should not be allowed to continue.

Subsidy change in action - Block 657292

A final note

When other project realise what has happened here, undoubtable they will try to follow Decred’s path and take the credit for themselves. This post and on-chain data acts as proof that Decred was the first project to move in this direction and did so with the least amount of fuss or disruption.

The Decred subsidy change went from start to finish in under six months. And that’s why I Decred!

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Disclaimer — Please note the above research is not financial advice and you should always do your own due diligence before investing your money. Investments can go down as well as up and cryptocurrencies are typically volatile assets.

The views expressed in this article are that of the author and based on the authors own research and investigation. The author is happy to receive comments, feedback and suggested edits for this channel to help evolve the open nature of the discussion.