This is perfect. Soooo well written Tim. You made this feel approachable even to non-coders like me. I feel like this really encapsulates one of the conversations we had a few months ago on my Dear Littlscribe show!
One part I am a little unclear on:
If you are planning to develop a change for the Steem blockchain, you are most likely going to need a lot of support from the official dev team. If you don't get their help, it will be very difficult (if not impossible) to get your change to the finish line.
My question is, if you've got 17 out of 21, then core dev really doesn't matter, does it? Wouldn't that just kind of seal the deal?
Technically yes. If 17/21 voted yes then it would fork and it would become the new consensus rules.
There is more to it though than just forking. A huge part of it is making sure that it is a safe/correct change. The main point I was trying to make is that we still need the official devs to be involved in order to help ensure that everything is coded correctly and won’t cause unforeseen issues. At least for now, I would not feel 100% safe accepting code that I wrote unless one of the official devs had looked it over first.
Also there is a lot of involvement with getting exchanges to upgrade. Steemit currently does all of that. There is also the fact that a lot of exchanges will only upgrade to versions that are from the official repository, which means if we want all the exchanges to pick up the fork that Steemit needs to review/approve/merge it.
Cool. That makes sense. Thanks for the explanation.