Bitcoin Forum

What about we vote some community representatives as a counterpoint towards the US Bitcoin foundation?

Community votes should always be able to overrule the senate / representatives.

Who do you propose?

Why do we need this? Bitcoin is a decentralized (kinda) currency.

That is step two imho.

Currently the devs and US foundation have too much power imho. Also the secrecy that is going on on the foundation forums is dangerous. I don't want to wake up some day realizing Bitcoin was assimilated by the established swamp with all it's potential wasted.

It would be nice if we as a swarm could operate without too much centralized power. Maybe we could vote via the blockchain ("Bitcoin days connected" similar to "Bitcoin days destroyed" comes to mind).

Voting via blockchain would be indeed very useful to represent the community as a whole.
Candidates should publish one of their unique bitcoin addresses. Every bitcoin user is allowed to vote for some candidate in every transaction by including the address of that candidate.
At all times, the proportion of included addresses of candidates in the unspend tx-outs represent the voting power of these senate members.

Kind of Delegative democracy in the blockchain (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy)

I think the coin age would somehow have to be accounted for so that it is not too easy fake votes.

Yup.

Woudn't the Feds or SD win this by a great margin?

please note, that I said "unspend" tx-outs. So your voting power is only proportional to your current bitcoin balance.
So the decisions would really be distributed to the many people who own and use bitcoins. Of course there might be some major bitcoin shareholder who owns 3% of all bitcoins (like the US goverment at the moment), but even with 3% it is hard to manipulate the decisions. So I think the power would be much better distributed than a voting by miners or a voting as in the bitcoin foundation.

The question is, which of the following two implementations is better:

• Simple: Just use the bitcoin blockchain and include the candidate voting directly by adding the candidate voting to transactions. This should be pretty straight forward to implement, but it does not allow to implement real Delegative democracy, because directly voting for something is not possible.
• Advanced: Use a separate p2p network and storage mechanism and only use bitcoin addresses and the corresponding unspend txouts to determine the voting power. This would allow to really implement Delegative democracy while using bitcoins as a backend to determine how much voting power each public address has.

Reminds me of this kind of democracy
"In addition, only (male) owners of freehold property or land worth at least forty shillings in a particular county were entitled to vote in that county; but those who owned property in multiple constituencies could vote multiple times; there was normally no requirement for an individual to actually inhabit a constituency in order to vote there."

I think a vote proportional to the number of bitcoins you are holding, is the most neutral way to get some representation of the whole community, which is technically feasible.
Your citation is more like the current voting procedure which is used in the bitcoin foundation (see https://bitcoinfoundation.org/static/content/IndustryMembershipBenefits.pdf).#

If you disagree, then please let us all know what you would propose as a neutral voting schema instead!

What are the options?

• 1) vote proportional to your investment into the foundation
• 2) one vote per person who registers with a proof of identity
• 3) vote proportional to mining power
• 4) vote proportional to bitcoin stake

Obviously point 1 is bad, because some rich person could just buy votes.
Point 2 is bad, because it is technically hard to setup and proof that nobody registers multiple times. Also it would open up the possibility that a rich person could buy accounts.
Point 3 is a nice technical solution, but mining power does not in any way represent the bitcoin community as a whole. These votes would be highly dominated by large mining cartels and mining pools and only very few people would have the control to vote for changes in network protocols.

So the only viable thing left is a voting system proportional to your bitcoin stake. It has all properties that are needed to decide for protocol changes and decisions that concern the whole bitcoin community. It is a very simple rule and therefore very neutral. The votes would be very diversified to many different people. People with more stake in bitcoin are more likely to prefer decisions which are really good for the whole community. It is a technical solution which does not require any validation of identities. It is as anonymous as bitcoin itself. It is fluid and you can always change your vote.

Wrong assumption.
People with more stake in bitcoin care about their wealth , if we're talking about people who started buying bitcoins since 2012.
I bet all my stash that 90% will vote for any kind of regulation if that pushed the price to 2000/BTC.

Of course when they talk about , it's "bitcoin" that matters "the community" but in reality it's their investment that count.
Haven't you seen that in politics?
I've seen politicians kissing babies and playing with children then reducing the funds for education and health.
Why should the investors in bitcoin oriented to the sentiment of the community and not to it's welfare.

At least it would be transparent.

Anyway for a start it would be also ok to have a forum vote imho.

I agree that we need to elect our own community elected representative of Bitcoin. It is obvious the Bitcoin Foundation is in bed with the American government and are willing to bend over backwards for them. We need someone that stands up for what most normal Bitcoin users believe in and someone whom represents us well.

Agreed.

We already have a forum to discuss our ideas, we just have to do polls on all subjects.
and above all make it easy to find those polls and categorize them for easy tracking.

The idea of proof of ownership is pretty good too, but what if someone just made up a lot of names and spread their BTC across multiple accounts? and besides it would cause a anonymity problem, makes people easy to track.

We can vote on trust, If a trust rating system is setup to represent the entire community it could be done.

everyone gets 100 trust points to start, everyday you log into the forum you get 10 points, based on forum participation you get automatic trust points; The more you post the more points you get, but these points can be offset by negative trust... basically you get -100, negative points that you can give to people's post, just to stop spamming.

the positive points are for voting, if someone comes up with a proposition or idea that is really good, you give that idea points; If a poll is relevant you give that poll points, if a poll is to your liking you can vote using one of your points; All points you give out go to the person who posted any of the types of the aforementioned posts.

People who do good by the community get more chances to vote, so vote responsibly.  

If we branch and categorize the propositions,ideas and polls properly, just basically adding metadata to connect all relevant information, by the original poster of course, modifiable only by them, we can create a robust branched category of relevance between all the senate voting.  Plus, make all the points given to those posts visible, so the most agreed upon posts can be easily known.

I'm envisioning a graphical user interface, if possible, where you see the web of categories that can be re-arranged to your search criteria and see all relevant categories to view posts; The posts with the most points are easily visible but the least considered ideas will be further away.

It could work for mass voting.

 

Similar idea here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=335024  Can we discuss an alternative entity to the bitcoin foundation?

The forum is loaded with money so some modifications should be possible - don't think it will be necessary to start, though.