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

["t. khan" <teekhan42@gmail.com>]

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Please comment on this work-in-progress BIP.

Thanks,

- t.k.

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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.

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