Having a voting process essentially guarantees a central authority to count and enforce the votes.
Not necessarily. You can implement these things in code - that is how these things activate anyway. Of course one could say that the person/people that create the code and set the parameters could be seen as a point of centralisation. I don't think there is a simple solution!
Agreed. In the end, the people who have invested the most time, money and energy into it will fight the most for it and enforce their vision. I believe this is why you see the miners, the exchanges, etc. having these meetings and pushing proposals forward.
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Yes and since they have the most invested they are likely frustrated by the current stalemate even more than the regular user.
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I completely agree. I believe that some of the large mining pools might expand their influence and get things done by sponsoring/hiring a Bitcoin developer to contribute to Core. This is how influence expands in the Linux space.
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