Rough Consensus

Rough consensus is a way of making decisions in which a group moves forward once most participants broadly agree and every serious objection has been considered, rather than waiting for unanimity or counting votes. The idea is closely tied to the Internet Engineering Task Force, the body that develops internet standards. In a 1992 talk the computer scientist David Clark summed up its culture as rejecting "kings, presidents and voting" in favour of "rough consensus and running code", and a later IETF document, RFC 7282, set out how chairs judge whether objections have been answered. The approach is common in open-source projects and in crypto. Changes to Bitcoin, proposed through a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal, are adopted only when developers, node operators and users broadly accept them, a form of off-chain governance. Critics say "rough" can hide who really decides.