Investor Review Phase

Buy-In : Investors, Miners, Auditors

Support : Researchers, Protocol Developers, Power Users, Industry

In some sense investors always get the final word on what “Bitcoin” is – they decide what software they run to audit their ownership and global supply, they collectively decide what the ticker points at, they decide how to price Bitcoin in terms of other currencies, and they decide what features they will and won’t use when storing and spending their coins.

Having investor review as the final phase of establishing social consensus thus serves two purposes: it acknowledges that investors have the final say, and it also gives them the benefit of all the effort and results from the previous phases, to make their final decision a more informed one.

The goal at this phase is thus to ensure that the previous phases were executed in good faith and were complete – that the proposal has been reviewed by researchers, is able to be implemented as planned, and fits in well in the ecosystem, and, if activated, will be quickly ready for productive use.