Re: [bitcoin-dev] [Pre-BIP] Community Consensus Voting System

[Luke Dashjr <luke@dashjr.org>]

Strongly disagree with buying "votes", or portraying open standards as a 
voting process. Also, this depends on address reuse, so it's fundamentally 
flawed in design.

Some way for people to express their support weighed by coins (without 
losing/spending them), and possibly weighed by running a full node, might 
still be desirable. The most straightforward way to do this is to support 
message signatures somehow (ideally without using the same pubkey as 
spending), and some [inherently unreliable, but perhaps useful if the 
community "colludes" to not-cheat] way to sign with ones' full node.

Note also that the BIP process already has BIP Comments for leaving textual 
opinions on the BIP unrelated to stake. See BIP 2 for details on that.

Luke


On Thursday, February 02, 2017 7:39:51 PM t. khan via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> Please comment on this work-in-progress BIP.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> - t.k.
> 
> ----------------------
> BIP: ?
> Layer: Process
> Title: Community Consensus Voting System
> Author: t.khan <teekhan42@gmail.com>
> Comments-Summary: No comments yet.
> Comments-URI: TBD
> Status: Draft
> Type: Standards Track
> Created: 2017-02-02
> License: BSD-2
> Voting Address: 3CoFA3JiK5wxe9ze2HoDGDTmZvkE5Uuwh8  (just an example, don’t
> send to this!)
> 
> Abstract
> Community Consensus Voting System (CCVS) will allow developers to measure
> support for BIPs prior to implementation.
> 
> Motivation
> We currently have no way of measuring consensus for potential changes to
> the Bitcoin protocol. This is especially problematic for controversial
> changes such as the max block size limit. As a result, we have many
> proposed solutions but no clear direction.
> 
> Also, due to our lack of ability to measure consensus, there is a general
> feeling among many in the community that developers aren’t listening to
> their concerns. This is a valid complaint, as it’s not possible to listen
> to thousands of voices all shouting different things in a crowded
> room—basically the situation in the Bitcoin community today.
> 
> The CCVS will allow the general public, miners, companies using Bitcoin,
> and developers to vote for their preferred BIP in a way that’s public and
> relatively difficult (expensive) to manipulate.
> 
> Specification
> Each competing BIP will be assigned a unique bitcoin address which is added
> to each header. Anyone who wanted to vote would cast their ballot by
> sending a small amount (0.0001 btc) to their preferred BIP's address. Each
> transaction counts as 1 vote.
> 
> Confirmed Vote Multiplier:
> Mining Pools, companies using Bitcoin, and Core maintainers/contributors
> are allowed one confirmed vote each. A confirmed vote is worth 10,000x a
> regular vote.
> 
> For example:
> 
> Slush Pool casts a vote for their preferred BIP and then states publicly
> (on their blog) their vote and the transaction ID and emails the URL to the
> admin of this system. In the final tally, this vote will count as 10,000
> votes.
> 
> Coinbase, Antpool, BitPay, BitFury, etc., all do the same.
> 
> Confirmed votes would be added to a new section in each respective BIP as a
> public record.
> 
> Voting would run for a pre-defined period, ending when a particular block
> number is mined.
> 
> 
> Rationale
> Confirmed Vote Multiplier - The purpose of this is twofold; it gives a
> larger voice to organizations and the people who will have to do the work
> to implement whatever BIP the community prefers, and it will negate the
> effect of anyone trying to skew the results by voting repeatedly.
> 
> Definitions
> Miner: any individual or organization that has mined at least one valid
> block in the last 2016 blocks.
> 
> Company using Bitcoin: any organization using Bitcoin for financial, asset
> or other purposes, with either under development and released solutions.
> 
> Developer: any individual who has or had commit access, and any individual
> who has authored a BIP
> 
> Unresolved Issues
> Node voting: It would be desirable for any full node running an up-to-date
> blockchain to also be able to vote with a multiplier (e.g. 100x). But as
> this would require code changes, it is outside the scope of this BIP.
> 
> Copyright
> This BIP is licensed under the BSD 2-clause license.