Hive needs to stop all the hardforking. I don’t mean that hive blockchain developers need to stop trying to create new hardforks. I mean hive witnesses need to stop activating them.
At some point, we need to prove that we can stop changing the code by using DPOS as intended. Right now, DPOS hasn’t been proven all that much. I’m sure you can show situations where DPOS saved the day. But we need to go long stretches of time with a looming change that can’t be activated because it’s blocked by a group of opinionated stakeholders hell bent on stability for the sake of stability.
Does it have to be now? Why not? No time like the present. It’s not like someone is waiting for HF28 to start investing.
The only place for Hive to grow is in the long tail. Remember that?
This idea doesn't necessarily preclude security fixes, but it very well could. An overstated security fix should be blocked.
In theory, DPOS can have higher stability than other consensus algorithms. Demonstrating this stability is pretty important. Probably more important than any individual feature in a hypothetical hardfork moving forward.
If someone says, "Hey, why doesn't Hive have multiple assets, besides HIVE and HBD?" We should be able to truthfully say, "Well, we could. The code exists, but the witnesses won't activate the change because they value consensus immutability more than a multi-asset blockchain, right now."
I think that would be a real feather in our cap.
Maybe it takes 10 years of immutability for us to finally come around to the next change. We made our point, then. At that point in the future we now value a change to consensus more than the immutability because life has become untenable to go without this change any longer.
As it stands, we've settled down to about one per year. But even then, we haven't ever really had an intentional denial of a hardfork being offered, except perhaps HF17/18, for a short period.
In addition, it is my opinion that if the next hardfork release notes are as bad as HF26/27, nobody should take that hardfork seriously. Regardless of how well implemented the code is, if the developers can’t be bothered to write any kind of release notes for a hardfork, nobody should consider deploying it on the mainnet.
That was the worst. I don’t know how witnesses could ever accept such a poor display. Rather embarrassing, to be honest.
