There is no immutable consensus. Any and all consensus mechanisms and distributed ledgers, no matter how decentralized, are human constructs and can be updated, forked, obsolesced, attacked, or generally delegitimized. This isn't some impossible idea in the blockchain world either as the current Ethereum chain is the direct result of altering the ledger to rewrite history. And beyond that, the Ethereum blockchain is constantly updated with improvement protocols, including contentious updates like the current EIP 1559. Because of this ability to change and adapt, it becomes evident that blockchain systems and distributed ledgers, although new technology, are the same as any other social contract.
The United States constitution lays out the blueprints for a general post-enlightenment government with three branches: Executive, Legislative, and Judicial. For the non-indoctrinated, the Legislative branch, which in the USA is split in two (House and Senate) writes the laws; the Executive branch enforces/acts on the laws; and the Judicial branch is the court system including the highest court in the land, the Supreme Court. All these branches have checks and balances against each other, but ultimately form a government instituted among men.
Crypto mirrors this model: Developers are similar to the legislative branch as they write the improvement protocols and choose which aspects get updated; The miners/stakers are the executive branch as they are the ones literally executing the updates; and the judicial is the userbase in general. Sentiment of crypto influencers like Vitalik himself, crypto podcasters, investors, and other crypto personalities can greatly influence the users and could be considered the judges as the users the jurors.
Note: Above is a simplification. The different power of each group and the nuanced relation to each other is beyond the scope of part 1.
If a development is proposed, then all three of these groups must come together as developers have to actually code it, miners/stakers have to actually implement it, and the crypto influencers will develop sentiment that ultimately decides how many people - or how much money - adopts the new proposal or rejects the proposal and migrates to a competing chain. Similarly, if there is a black swan event like the DAO hack, these forces can work together to arbitrarily modify the ledger or edit the codebase to remedy the situation.
This post has simply been to contextualize my meta crypto governance theory. I don't expect the reader to necessarily have learned anything new, but I hope it has adequately framed the lens at which the rest of this theory will be developed. In the future, we will look at the groups more in-depth - their strengths and weaknesses, their different sub-groups - the relationship between the groups, pitfalls and benefits of the current ecosystem, and potential development of the crypto social contract.
Let me know if you have any questions or comments down below, and let me know if you have any potential sources about similar theories.
Thank you for your time,
-Phased0x
Twitter: phased0x