Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Egalitarian Society or Benevolent Dictatorship: The State of Cryptocurrency Governance

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 10958))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

In this paper we initiate a quantitative study of the decentralization of the governance structures of Bitcoin and Ethereum. In particular, we scraped the open-source repositories associated with their respective codebases and improvement proposals to find the number of people contributing to the code itself and to the overall discussion. We then present different metrics to quantify decentralization, both in each of the cryptocurrencies and, for comparison, in two popular open-source programming languages: Clojure and Rust. We find that for both cryptocurrencies and programming languages, there is usually a handful of people that accounts for most of the discussion. We also look into the effect of forks in Bitcoin and Ethereum, and find that there is little intersection between the communities of the original currencies and those of the forks.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    http://ethdocs.org/en/latest/ethereum-clients/choosing-a-client.html#why-are-there-multiple-ethereum-clients.

References

  1. BIPS GitHub. github.com/bitcoin/bips

  2. Bitcoin Cash. https://www.bitcoincash.org/

  3. Blockstream. https://blockstream.com/

  4. Cryptocurrency market capitalizations. https://coinmarketcap.com/. Accessed 3 Nov 2017

  5. EIPs GitHub. github.com/ethereum/EIPs

  6. Ethereum. https://ethereum.org/

  7. Ethereum Classic. https://ethereumclassic.github.io/

  8. Parity. https://parity.io/

  9. Steemit. steemit.com

  10. Tezos. tezos.com

  11. Atzori, M.: Blockchain technology and decentralized governance: is the state still necessary? (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Böhme, R., Christin, N., Edelman, B., Moore, T.: Bitcoin: economics, technology, and governance. J. Econ. Perspect. 29(2), 213–238 (2015)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. De Filippi, P., Loveluck, B.: The invisible politics of bitcoin: governance crisis of a decentralised infrastructure. Internet Policy Rev. 5, 1–28 (2016)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Dice, L.R.: Measures of the amount of ecologic association between species. Ecology 26(3), 297–302 (1945)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Gandal, N., Halaburda, H.: Can we predict the winner in a market with network effects? Competition in cryptocurrency market. Games 7(3), 1–21 (2016)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  16. Gervais, A., Karame, G., Capkun, S., Capkun, V.: Is bitcoin a decentralized currency? In: IEEE Security and Privacy (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Greenberg, A.: Visa, Mastercard move to choke WikiLeaks, December 2010. http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/12/07/visa-mastercard-move-to-choke-wikileaks/

  18. Hu, Y., Zhang, J., Bai, X., Yu, S., Yang, Z.: Influence analysis of GitHub repositories. SpringerPlus 5(1), 1268 (2016)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Jesus, C.D.: The DAO heist undone: 97% of eth holders vote for the hard fork, July 2016. https://futurism.com/the-dao-heist-undone-97-of-eth-holders-vote-for-the-hard-fork/

  20. Lehdonvirta, V.: The blockchain paradox: why distributed ledger technologies may do little to transform the economy (2016). www.oii.ox.ac.uk/the-blockchain-paradox-why-distributed-ledger-technologies-may-do-little-to-transform-the-economy/

  21. Mehta, S.: Statistics Topics. Createspace Independent Pub. (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Moore, T., Christin, N.: Beware the middleman: empirical analysis of bitcoin-exchange risk. In: Sadeghi, A.-R. (ed.) FC 2013. LNCS, vol. 7859, pp. 25–33. Springer, Heidelberg (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39884-1_3

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  23. Nakamoto, S.: Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Narayanan, A., Bonneau, J., Felten, E., Miller, A., Goldfeder, S.: Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies. Princeton University Press, Princeton (2016)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  25. Reijers, W., O’Brolcháin, F., Haynes, P.: Governance in blockchain technologies and social contract theories. Ledger 1, 134–151 (2016)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Reyes, C.L., Packin, N.G., Edwards, B.P.: Distributed governance (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  27. Sekhon, J.S.: Multivariate and propensity score matching software with automated balance optimization: the matching package for R. J. Stat. Softw. 42(7), 1–52 (2011)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  28. Simard, R., LÉcuyer, P., et al.: Computing the two-sided Kolmogorov-Smirnov distribution. J. Stat. Softw. 39(11), 1–18 (2011)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. Sørensen, T.: A method of establishing groups of equal amplitude in plant sociology based on similarity of species and its application to analyses of the vegetation on Danish commons. Biol. Skr. K. Dan. Vidensk. Selsk. 5, 1–34 (1948)

    Google Scholar 

  30. Srinivasan, B., Lee, L.: Quantifying decentralization (2017). https://news.earn.com/quantifying-decentralization-e39db233c28e

Download references

Acknowledgments

All authors are supported in part by EPSRC Grant EP/N028104/1. Mary Maller is supported by a scholarship from Microsoft Research. The authors would like to thank Sebastian Meiser and Tristan Caulfield for helpful discussions.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University College London, London, UK

    Sarah Azouvi, Mary Maller & Sarah Meiklejohn

Authors
  1. Sarah Azouvi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Mary Maller
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Sarah Meiklejohn
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sarah Azouvi .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel

    Aviv Zohar

  2. Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel

    Ittay Eyal

  3. University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia

    Vanessa Teague

  4. Concordia University, Beaconsfield, QC, Canada

    Jeremy Clark

  5. Computer Science and Mathematics, Stirling University, Stirling, UK

    Andrea Bracciali

  6. Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Federico Pintore

  7. Department of Mathematics, University of Trento, Trento, Italy

    Massimiliano Sala

A Statistical Tables and Figures

A Statistical Tables and Figures

See (Fig. 6).

Table 7. p-values for the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test on the number of authors per file.
Full size table
Table 8. p-values for the number of comments per author
Full size table
Fig. 6.
figure 6

The number of commenters for each repository, ranked from most to fewest comments, ignoring commenters with less than 5 comments.

Full size image

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 International Financial Cryptography Association

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Azouvi, S., Maller, M., Meiklejohn, S. (2019). Egalitarian Society or Benevolent Dictatorship: The State of Cryptocurrency Governance. In: Zohar, A., et al. Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10958. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-58820-8_10

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-58820-8_10

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-58819-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-58820-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation