Bitcoin Forum

We have a governance problem right now with the block size issue. It's not easy getting a consensus, it might even be impossible, so I wonder if it could be possible to organize a vote. Here's how we could do it.

To participate, you'd need to own BTC, and have several wallets, but I guess all of us do.

I would move, say, 5 BTC, from one of my wallets to another of my wallets, on a given day. The trick would be to embed in that transaction some code (which would have to be agreed upon beforehand), which would mean "I support XT" or "I support BIP 100". The transaction would be in the blockchain, and at the end of the day, some bot would calculate how many BTC have been moved with "I support XT" or "I support BIP 100".

I understand this system would give more voting rights to those who own the most BTC, but that doesn't worry me because I believe the more BTC you own, the best choice you will make to protect your investment. But we would need a system to prevent voters voting several times. I suggest that to have their votes validated, there should be no other transactions from the receiving wallet on voting day.

Now, since I'm not much of a techie, is that possible? And is it a good idea?

We don't want democracy. In democracies 10 sheeps vote is better than 9 professors. The right one is not always the most voted. I'm strongly against this proposition.

You should look up the definition of Oligarchy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligarchy which is a far cry from Democracy.

I bolded your statement above that is almost the definition of an Oligarchy, so not sure where your idea of Democracy fit into this theory.

+1. We don't need democracy. We need "meritocracy". The people who knows what are they doing should decide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy

Agree with the meritocracy. Regular people proposing solutions are not good, as they do not know about all the risks and problems it takes to implement them

Ah, yes, put all your trust in the "experts"..... what could go wrong?

Meritocracy, oligarchy, I'm very familiar with those terms.

My proposal would be quite meritocratic, assuming those who own the most BTC have more merit. It would also be much more democratic than the present situation, since actually there are very, very few people deciding about the block size issue we're facing: miners. Nobody else but miners. Miners choose to adopt XT or not. My proposal would enlarge the number of voters to anyone owning BTC.

You might as well stick with the financial system we already have then and not even worry about BTC, as the current system is run by the people who control the most $$. If your ideal system is already in existence, why are you looking elsewhere? After all, you originally said: , just substitute $$ for BTC and you already have the perfect system according to your vision.

I've NOT said this was the perfect system. Besides, BTC is actually hardly better. My proposal would increase the number of people who have a say in BTC's future.

Now, I hope someone could reply about the technical feasibility of my idea.

I partially agree with you...
I believe that everyone should have the same right to vote and his vote count the same as others... that would be truly democratic.
The option you are presenting is not democratic. It looks more like an Oligarky or should I say the Majority's dictatorship...??

+2

and we've already got one. The commits to the Bitcoin github repo are judged on their merit. By just a couple of people, who just so happen to have exercised good judgment so far.

Maybe if the quorum was made higher, then we'd get better decision making. Don't know about that, the sheeps and professors analogy from cakir is very apt.

aka the lunatics running the asylum  :-X

Which is your asylum of preference, kelsey? Your not another one of the Room 101 people are you?  :D

OK, and who decides who those people are?
And how is it any different than what we have now with the blocksize debate?
It's either Core or XT, right?

I'm very disappointed nobody seems to see that what I'm proposing would make BTC more democratic than it is. Oligarchy, or meritocracy, is pretty much what we're having now and nobody wants this to change. OK, I got it.

i'm more a bitcoin is a solution looking for a problem type person  ;)

We do not have a democracy and we certainly will never have it.

Satoshi Nakamoto designed the system in a way that the decisions are
made by the miners. He certainly thought this would enforce some kind
of democracy: Everybody could run a miner on his PC and setting up
some kind of dedicated high performance computer systems just for this
purpose should not pay out.

He was not aware of ASICs and the concentration of mining power in the
hands of a few people.

However, even if miners finally can decide what to do, there are
strong forcing for a consensus and for a conservative behaviour:
- miners who create a fork will sit alone on their chain.
- miners have to respect the technical constraints (bandwidth etc)
  otherwise they are lost.
- Miners have to serve the community, otherwise the price of bitcoin
  will fall and they will not make any profit (in fiat).
- Large miners depend on profits in fiat: they have expenses in
  electricity, hardware cost, infrastructure, etc.
- Small miners can ignore these costs, so there is still some chance
  for democracy. Be aware of your power!

The code developers do not have any power. Everybody can set up a fork
(as XT). But in order to succeed he has to achieve consensus.

To conclude: I like bitcoin very much. It is anarchy with a very
strong forcing for consensus. It now has survived for approximately 5
years.  It is really interesting to see how this system will evolve
further under real world conditions.  Bitcoin is in beta status and a big
experiment. I am looking forward into the future.

yup exactly,miners vote with their hashing power.

Bitcoiners could vote with their funds too its just not directly built into the software. But there is no reason coinage voting couldnt exist.

2 coders want to take control, to help business buddies from like another 6 who also want to help business buddies from the miners who want profits when tis all controlled by market forces.

so winning the battle may just lose them the war ;)

Yes, consensus. There's nothing wrong with that except that the actual quantity of people needed to get it is probably too small. We would have the same problem with coinage voting, but it would be better as there are always more and more people owning BTC, in total opposition to miners, who are fewer and fewer.

Democracy make all of us croos the limit. we show up the human right overly. and finnaly we hate the rules,we hate to be ruled. and war everywhere soon..  :-[

Suppose we do this. What will be the end? For which will serve this activity? We are not developers and no one will hear what we have made. Maybe to pass the time it will be a good joke bu that can be the maximum we can arrive.

I don't know if I agree with the premise of using bitcoin holdings as votes but I'll contribute this anyway. As far as solving the double-voting issue, I've heard alt/sidechain Credits (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1037244) is able to distinguish Bitcoin already used to claim its credits from "fresh" Bitcoin. If someone were to implement a voting sidechain or something like that, the Credits code could help with it.

Indeed bitcoin should be run as a corporation.

It should be % ownership  based voting, just like in a corporation.



The fact that 100000 newbies come in, each with 10 satoshis gained from faucet payments, just to distort the voting mechanism is a bad idea.

Democracy is flawed, both in real life, as in here, we need a capitalist solution here, so it should be a % ownership based vote!

In the very early days of democracy, say in the 17th century, it was widely accepted that only the rich, those who paid tax, were allowed to participate in any kind of vote. Voting rights were progressively extended to every man, then every woman.

Even if a result was reached from the voting let's say in favor of increasing the blocksize, how sure are we that the opposer would accept the result and then move on with life? This issue will still be left hanging and there are bound to be people not wanting to accept the result and will give all sorts of reason to cry foul.

This hardly matters, just look at politics. Some Americans are not seeing Obama as their president because is a black muslim, but he's in the White House, and this is what matters to most onlookers. Right now, many BTC investors are worried because they don't know where BTC's heading. If there was a majority towards one precise direction, that would make them confident again. Some miners may not be happy about the outcome, but nobody will care about them since they are a minority.

My first thought would be for a voting transaction to be a transaction with one input (say 5 BTC as above) and two outputs:

• 5 BTC: OP_DUP OP_HASH160 <pubKeyHash> OP_EQUALVERIFY OP_CHECKSIG
• 0 BTC: OP_RETURN PUSHDATA(<ASCII vote message>)

Organising this to occur on a single day would be difficult.  Perhaps people could vote months in advance of a set block number.  Once this set block is generated and sufficently well buried, the voting transactions still unspent at that point could be summed.

It's an interesting idea but there may be some problems with it.  Perhaps these can be fixed.

For one, I could imagine a powerful interest buying many bitcoins, voting, and immediately selling the bitcoins again.  It's tenuous to suggest that large bitcoin holders will make good decisions or even have Bitcoin's interest at heart.  You could counter this by making the voting transactions unspendable for a number of years (protocol change I think) but this may overly discourage voting.

Another thing to bear in mind is that these votes will be public when they are cast.  You might want to think about tactical voting and/or encryption.

PS: I'd avoid the term "democracy" in future proposals because you'll generate noise (as witnessed in this thread) and because Bitcoin itself doesn't have a concept of person so a democratic, protocol-level mechanism is impossible.  "stake voting" is perhaps more accurate.

"Stake voting", you're probably right on that. It would be pretty much like a big firm, where the biggest shareholders have the last word. I hadn't thought about people buying then selling BTC to gain voting rights, but I don't see it as a big issue since it should be really expensive with prices going up if many people buy at the same time, then going down if everybody sells again at the same time. Voting process shall be as quick as possible, but how can this be an issue when you'll vote at home?

I kinda like your idea of 2 outputs with a "blank" one. A possible issue could be that it would not be doable with all clients. Much organization would be needed...

I've just discovered that someone has already done what I've been thinking about.

http://coin-vote.com/

I don't like this way they do things, though.

From their FAQ:

How do I vote?

You first select your choice on a question, then press "Submit". You will be given a "Message to be signed", along with two empty fields. Go to your bitcoin wallet, choose an address that holds funds and use your wallet or bitcoin key to sign the message. You have to put the address (or TXID) which you used to make the signature in the first field on the coin-vote website, and the signature produced by your wallet in the second. Then, click submit. Your vote will be verified and counted.

I'm not comfortable doing this.

Yes, I was just trying to design a transaction that would be considered "standard" by the reference client.  More exotic designs (such as having multiple OP_RETURN outputs) would be difficult to propogate.

If you want it to be so that a vote can be cast easily by most/all clients then you have more of a challenge.  Without some coin control, the voter would have no easy way to tie his wallets balance to a particular vote.  This will basically be by design; good wallets protect the user's financial privacy by default.  With coin control, a user might replace the OP_RETURN output with a regular transaction, burning a small number of satoshi to a special voting address.  The number of satoshi burnt would correspond to the choice of the voter.  Expect to meet resistance with such a proposal though as these voting outputs would not be "provably unspendable", tantamount to an attack on pruning nodes.


Why not?  What is it that makes you uncomfortable?

The main difference between this approach and ours is in whether the votes are store on-chain or off-chain.  Another, more practical difference is in the wallet features needed to cast a vote (message signing/verification is more common than OP_RETURN support).

Sounds to me like OP is suggesting a sort of referendum. I get where he's coming from but I think he's misguided. I own some btc, but I really don't understand the whole thing enough to feel qualified to vote. I would simply be guessing. Just like most voters do in a democracy. Wether they know it or not.
So far, the consensus system has worked in my favour, so it's the best option IMO. I also win a few at the $2 window at the track from time to time. Still doesn't mean I know what I'm doing, despite what I tell everybody in the clubhouse afterwards.

it not a good idea to make a voting system.
just use what you think is right..

i can not configure how do we do a democray into this BTC i mean you need a vote and payed? its against freedom

I`m not saying only the rich, but i`m saying proportional to the % they hold.

After all bitcoin is an investment, and those who hold the most / risk the most of their money in bitcoin, should be the ones that pull the strings.


Would you like your company that you own 100% be run by half-idiots who dont have a clue about company running just because of the sake of democracy?


Sorry but demoncracy never worked.

Democracy is a lie, a minority rules over the majority imposing rigged rules and deceiving the masses.

It's done and don't have anything to do with how bitcoin works.

How about anyone that wants to vote, vanity gen some addresses say

1BIPa101......
1BIPa102......

Everyone that wants to vote puts 1 BTC in their first choice, 2 BTC in their second 3BTC in their 3rd [or reverse order-whatever] address and leaves it there for as long as the voting is open. We don't say when the votes will be counted but give a rough indication of sometime in October, say. Then we count up the number of addresses of each in the block chain that have a single transaction of 1,2,3 BTC incoming (ignore those that move it out again). Once the voting is over, you can move your coin.

Democracy is not the government of choice. It is better, perhaps, than dictatorship. But it actually IS a form of dictatorship. Democracy is dictatorship by the majority. And because the dictates of the majority must be directed, there is still control of the whole by the few.

The answer is, let everyone be free to do and be everything that he wants. The only time he should be controlled by the people, is when he harms someone or damages his property. Otherwise, complete freedom.

After all. We are all certainly more capable of ruling our own life than anyone else is.

:)

I think you are confusing democracy with a technical method of communicating ones desire for a choice given to them.

The simple dictionary definitions might suggest this. But when you get into the nitty-gritty of how a democracy works, it is just as I said in simple terms. From http://www.ait.org.tw/infousa/zhtw/docs/whatsdem/whatdm2.htm:
It is just as I said. In a democracy, the majority sets the tone, and then the few regulate the many by interpreting the tone as they wish.

:)

I don’t see how expressing our intention in this way is any different than doing it in a forum; there will no way to enforce this and make others acknowledge our “decision”.

I've thought of coin control. That was one of the reason behind the choice of a speedy vote. No more than 24 hours, with voters making the pledge not to make any other transaction during the allowed voting period.

I guess this isn't going anywhere, though. I was looking for a way to solve the blocksize issue, but my idea hasn't had enough support so far. When I look at all the posts on this topic, there is clearly more people against the idea than there are supporters. Well, it was worth trying.

Most of us bitcoiners should participate and also bring our opinion on the said topic. We have also created a poll question with this one. You can use your bitcoin signatures to vote for your chosen opinion here http://coin-vote.com/poll/55e8a33299baadff0a34acb7 

If we built voting contracts on the Bitcoin blockchain, like with Counterparty, and nobody could vote unless his contract was on the blockchain, we might be able to solve a lot of voting/election fraud problems.

:)

I appreciate the effort.

Thanks! The idea is in the air. Someone may pick it up someday if it ever becomes useful to find out what large BTC holders really want. I'm not expecting that in the near future, but BTC shall have a long life.