I think Bitcoin would be the first to achieve this and it would send a healthy precedent (Bitcoin's rules are indeed hard to change, but it's possible). Click to expand...

I feel like spinoffs will be a continual thing in the future. There might be weekly spinoffs, almost all of them ignored and seeing only a tiny bit of trading by arbitrageurs ready to take money from each deadend spinoff's supporters. Of course whenever there is an actual need for a spinoff, the sellers have a chance to lose their shirts. There is no real harm in having tons of spinoffs as we are approaching a governance challenge. They will just be ignored until needed, like freeway offramps. When needed, I think everything said about spinoffs in the past will suddenly be forgotten and people will see them as the way forward.So if a spinoff faces difficulties, it will generally just be bypassed until the next weekly batch of spinoffs, or whatever the timescale is.The effect once the system is mature should be thus: Bitcoin can and will change however it needs to, whenever it needs to, but will only do this if there is sufficient investor support - a high bar to reach. Also, there is a possibility that "winner does NOT take all" and we end up with a split into two persistent chains, which start out updating the very same ledger. Those cases, too, would only happen when the market deems a split to be the most value-enhancing.Futures markets should provide a very powerful preview (as powerful as the legendary accuracy of prediction markets) of how a spinoff will fare, making it easy to know whether to take a spinoff seriously, and to know this well in advance so that mining and infrastructure can be put in place and so that real debate of an urgent pitch can happen in case there are any issues.I always like to note that it isn't really about giving Bitcoin the "just right" amount of conservatism toward change, but rather about letting the market of investors determine the change. Bitcoin investors have a fundamental conservatism because its value derives from its function as sound money, but they would be quite willing to change when it is clearly necessary. Rather than just falling somewhere on the spectrum between liberal and conservative, with spinoffs moving the system toward liberal, I think they in fact move the system toward "intelligent." Conservative about change on matters where it's warranted, liberal about change on matters where it isn't. It's the wisdom of crowds channeled properly, through market, and this is what I've always thought of Bitcoin as anyway. It's not the wisdom of Satoshi, he just got it on a decent-enough footing (see the Forkology series 101 to 501 here if you haven't yet; I think you may find it quite interesting).