Well, and that is simply not casting a vote. Voting isn't just, as I said elsewhere here recently, "inferring preferences from behavior". It's a regular process, a structured reassessing of power.
Maybe if you said "every year on March 1st, everyone shuts down their client and chooses a new one" and there were several well-maintained clients that had different policy choices encoded into them for people to "vote" with, then we'd be a little closer to a democratic power-in-the-hands-of-the-people kind of thing.
But as it is right now? No, there's no voting, nor democratic power-sharing, in Bitcoin.
What guarantees do you have the president you elect will do what he says? What is your recourse if he doesn't live up to your expectations?
Being able to change one's vote at any time regarding any issue seems preferable to everyone sitting powerless for four years at a time in between scheduled elections.
You and the other bitcoin advocates here are actually doing a really good job illustrating my point.
I'm saying, bitcoin isn't "power to the people," that it is anti-democratic by design, and you and the other guy here are trying to dodge and ignore that with language games about "the market decides" and irrelevant stuff about how politicians lie.
I get it, bitcoin is your chance to be one of the people "in the know" as it were, one of the powerful ones, and you don't want to give that up. Please spare us the rhetoric about how it's for our own good, though.
"Being able to change one's vote at any time regarding any issue seems preferable to everyone sitting powerless for four years at a time in between scheduled elections"
I'm not even addressing what the OP was telling you, that you don't vote and that the "votes" are all in the hands of a few people.
But, even if everyone was entitled to a vote, being able to change it anytime they like would make a for a very, very poor government system.
I can only imagine, 1st long term project the government had that didn't give you short term profit you would change your vote.
P.S.: Interestingly enough is exactly what is happening in Bitcoin right now: long term sustainability calls for changes to the block size, but short term profit calls for it to remain the same, so the few miners that control the network just go for the short term profit.
fwiw, many people don't agree with the "for sustainability" argument.
Increasing blocksize is actually a negative, because it lets people continue sending low-value transactions that they wouldn't actually pay for. It externalizes their costs to the entire network, making verification harder, etc.
When the required fee makes your current uses of btc unprofitable, either send larger amounts at a time or use a sidechain, etc. The fee is a DoS-prevention mechanism.
The undemocratic part was not that one. Like I said: "even if everyone was entitled to a vote and to change it whenever they want" and then carried out the argument based on that alternative scenario to bitcoin reality and explained why that would be a bad system.
The reality is that just an handful of people can vote in this system, the ones that control all the mining. All other people are left using a system in which they have no say.
That's a classical textbook Plutocracy and completely un-democratic.
Maybe if you said "every year on March 1st, everyone shuts down their client and chooses a new one" and there were several well-maintained clients that had different policy choices encoded into them for people to "vote" with, then we'd be a little closer to a democratic power-in-the-hands-of-the-people kind of thing.
But as it is right now? No, there's no voting, nor democratic power-sharing, in Bitcoin.