Bitcoin nodes voting I'm just watching Adam Back &amp; Gregory Maxwell: Blockstream and Sidechains interview, and wondering how the decision of further Bitcoin core development are made. I know about Bitcoin Foundation, but I do not think that board members represent majority of voting power, when it comes to decision making for bitcoin core development, altough there are some core development members.

Who does make the decision which feature of bitcoin to include?

What will be the procedure of voting (who and how) would decide whether or not to include Sidechains?

Does the participant nodes (roughly more than 6300) vote as well?
The actual stated development process can be found here. That said, there's become a rule where enough core developers need to "ACK" it like seen in this pull request.

Will there be a procedure for voting? If core devs feel it is safe, tested, useful, well written, match coding style, etc. then it gets merged into bitcoin. This is usually not easy and the bitcoin development archives and the numerous pull requests that haven't made any headway should make this obvious.

Will Sidechains get in? The big thing to note about sidechains is that at least a few of the core developers are actively working on it. This means they're going to try their hardest to get it in. So there's a better chance than most features people usually propose.

Do nodes vote? They can, of course, refuse to upgrade their bitcoin client to the new version that has sidechains, for example. That's entirely their choice. But actual getting into the bitcoind code, they do not vote on. People can and do, fork bitcoin and use that as their node (Luke-Jr and Eligius being the most prominent example)