Bitcoin Forum

Hi,

I was wondering if bitcoin nodes could get voting rights and the network could vote on issues like blocksize debate. Is this something that is feasible ? We could stop nodes from voting that have not been active for say last 100 days (to stop people trying to influence voting at the last minute)

That's a really complex situation, you need to guarantee something like one node = one person, and that is very difficult to accomplish, currently as it is, people running a lot of nodes will have a bigger vote, and even if made a proposal to implement such a thing with the 100 days requirement it will take time to implement and some people can set up a shitload of nodes just in order to have more votes when it is fully implemented.

Mike Hearn commented on that in some talk or interview, the mathematics behind that that are very complex, Zero-Knowledge systems, and it would require something that is unique to every person on the planet to be associated with the node, like Passport, I don't think people will like it...

That would be a disaster basically , nodes have the right to vote is just like voting on Bitcointalk polls basically people have alternative accounts and they could vote more then once which screw things up .
Also how they are supposed to know who is running a node and who is not , even by using something like https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/ I suppose it's possible to trick and make software that does the same thing as Bitcoin Core , also ... how they will know you didn't run Bitcoin Core only for the moment of the vote then close it . All that looks complicated

I agree its complicated. I am thinking about what would happens if we go ahead with a fork increasing block size . In that case some nodes would accept the block and some wont. Nothing is stopping people from spawning more nodes in this case also. Which fork wins ? Shouldn't it be the one have more number of geographically spread nodes.
I was thinking how we could simulate/predict this behaviour by voting. Of course people could spawn more nodes (as in case of a real fork).  We need a way to weight down votes of newly spawned nodes / nodes connected to less number of peers.

In some ways this is already the way it works. Not exactly, but changes to the protocol are by adoption of the winning chain.

Nodes do have voting rights. A node votes for transactions and blocks by relaying them and against transactions and blocks by rejecting them.

However, unlike mining consensus, it takes much more than a majority to win.