Bitcoin Forum

PLEASE VOTE IN THE POLL

The communities response to my other thread referencing the current foundation has been more than a surprise. It seems that the foundation has been self appointed, appears to be self serving and is doing so whilst accepting dubious donations.

I propose therefore, that the community dissolve ties with this ponzi scheme and set up a new Bitcoin Foundation.

The core principles should be:

1. Accounts are made public. Spending must be focused entirely on furthering the Bitcoin idea i.e ATM's Marketing etc and Donations must be logged for public viewing (Donors can choose to remain anonymous)
2. Anyone can run for election to be on the foundation and is not restricted to large stakeholders or those with business interests.
3. The foundation is re-elected annually capped at a maximum of 2 years.


Please post with your suggestions. The community decides who represents and how they are represented.

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I would be more than willing to support this and would like to see this happen in the future.

The more the better.  :)

This is a idea I do support, although I would suggest that the new foundation should be registered as a non profit. Donations will only be used towards Bitcoin projects which benefit the community. The books would need to be open and every part of the foundation would need to be transparent.

Some key problems which it would face:

• Who would decide who wins the election
• Anyone associated with a Bitcoin should be disallowed or allowed to run for election
• Who owns the domain and the non profit organisation?

I would think that the community would elect who become board members of the Bitcoin foundation, however how would this be done? Most votes? Most votes could be manipulated by using such services as Tor to register many votes.

Allowing Bitcoin business holders could cause a few problems such as conflict of interest. But, not allowing business holders defeats the " Anyone can run for election" statement.

The foundation would have to register as a non profit therefore would require someone to actually register it as a non profit, therefore the person who does that will always be part of the Bitcoin foundation, unless the person is willing to not be part of the board and has simply registered it as a non profit organisation and owns the domain. That being said we would also need someone to run the election process and assign new members their positions.

I wouldn't introduce donations to become "lifetime members" because what's the point of that? That's just encouraging people to donate for no reason other than to get status of being part of the foundation.

Another question is, why does Bitcoin need a foundation at all? No one owns Bitcoin therefore, no one should be representing it's community.

My personal opinion on the matter is that we don't need a Bitcoin foundation to represent us as a community. That's not how Bitcoin works no one controls Bitcoin and no one represents Bitcoin. Satoshi is the one that created it but, he doesn't represent us because that's not why he created it. What if they make a bad decision it will reflect on the Bitcoin community. No one likes to be controlled and to be spoken for because we are all our own person. What makes the foundation to be correct in it's decision making process? Nothing, because they would take the option with the most votes which could not be the necessary the best decision, as well as some members of the Bitcoin community will disagree with any decision that is made by anyone.

I won't be supporting or claiming that any Bitcoin foundation represents the Bitcoin community even if they do achieve great things.

Can you guarantee that the new foundation doesn't end up becoming a self-serving pile of crap like the current foundation?

No, you can't.

Say NO to foundations.

The Bitcoin network is in itself a foundation both literally and figuratively and doesn't need a third party to speak for it.

Do we even need one at all? And can you define business interests? Many Bitcoin believers will have business interests. In fact, the greatest/smartest ones almost certainly will have.

I disagree. That is not how things get done in Washington. Without professional lobbyists, lawyers, editors, etc. You do not stand a chance at drawing anything but draconian laws made by completely ignorant policy makers. You cannot refuse to participate in the process then demand special rights and laws for bitcoin.
The reason bitcoin is succeeding in getting through the regulatory process in the U.S. is in part because of the work you don't see. Work done by the foundation.

I agree that not allowing people with Bitcoin businesses to run for election is a silly idea as they are indeed the smartest within the community.

Conflict of interest.

1. I think this can be done online safely with a vote. I'm sure the community has the expertise  to create a system that would not be compromised.
2. A 50%-50% of a board split between Bitcoin Business owners and non Business owners would be a fair compromise? This would better reflect the communities ideas as a whole. I dont think it would be fair to alienate either.
3. I believe the person who registers the organisation and the domain should be restricted from being a member of the board. They should be responsible for the administration of the election.
I agree that there should be no lifetime membership. In fact I dont see a reason to have membership at all. Any donations should be considered as a donation to the Bitcoin cause and not to join an elitist club.

The foundations purpose should to facilitate the adoption of Bitcoin and nothing else.

I propose that Board meetings are public via live stream.
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Another "foundation" (aka "self entitled group")? No, thank you.

 :D :D :D :D :D :D :D

Mixed reviews so op are you going to be doing this?

I could set up the site if there was a need.

foundation is not bitcoin.
bitcoin is P2P anarchy ... when it need, it work.

It would be pretty simple to tie votes to bitcoin amount.

Just send your vote in a message to [whoever compiles the result] and sign it with your bitcoin address, proving you own that address. Then at a given block height, it is really easy to check the balance in that account and weight the votes.

It has the advantage of being a stakes-weighted method, but it has the disadvantage of giving a LOT of weigth to big bitcoin owners. Unfortunately, it is the only scheme (I can think of) that cannot be cheated.

Any other scheme may be "cheated" by creating new addresses; splitting balance, etc... (Since address creation is inexpensive)

The only "cheat" that [whoever compiles the result] could do would be discarding some votes, but it the votes are made publicitly availables once recieved (even if in an anonymized form; prehaps by only showing the votes with the hash of the address and and amount rounded to the most significant digit), then people may check that the votes add up correctly, and if I find my vote had been discarded, I can publicitly complain about it.

I fail to see a conflict of interest; as having big stakes in Bitcoin, it would be in their best interest for Bitcoin to succeed... Which is the Foundation goal, promoting Bitcoin's success.

I don't say they must have ALL the voices in the foundation, but they must at least have some.

I am a candidate.

A very easy thing to write - but actually *impossible* to create unless your idea of a fair vote is say "proof of stake" (which means the people with the most Bitcoins win the vote) or perhaps "proof of work" (in which case those with the most powerful mining devices win).

You could do either of those but my guess is that you'll find most people are likely to think that a "fair vote" should be 1 vote per person. Just one snag with that though - there is simply no way to do that online!

I can think of one possible way. Create a foundation, associate membership with an account, allow one vote per account.

Then one could easily create multiple account. Of course one could put a CAPTCHA to prevent robots, but it is inevitable that people with a lot of ressource will cast more than their share of votes; for example by paying (many) people to register multiple accounts and then vote.

Good idea, I'd support this as well.

Really - so the person with the most "alts" wins!

You see - keep trying - there is simply *no* way to do it which is perhaps why we need to get over the whole "1 person 1 vote" concept.

You're surprised by reactions to trolling? You must be new here.

Yes. Basically, that's what you do when you start an organization.

To a certain extent, absolutely.

WTF are you talking about?
What are dubious donations and where do you see them?

I.e., you're basically appointing yourself to start serving yourself with organizing a "new Bitcoin Foundation" which will probably accept donations.

Sounds familiar. Now where exactly is your Foundation different from the existing one?

My suggestion: inform yourself about the existing Bitcoin Foundation.
Make an educated statement once you're done.

I support:
1) multiple foundations to further the cause of bitcoin,

additionally, I support foundations:
2) to further the cause of all cryptocurrencies,
3) that are organically formed, meaning community centered, mission oriented, bottom up elections, top down management, and all around accountability,
4) with a clearly stated mission, plain language bylaws, and self funded (dues, events, etc)

I believe there should be multiple foundations and that at least one of the foundations should:
5) form in an ad hoc fashion so as to allow for a great airing of views, and to allow the community to get to know itself
6) after about 1 month of open community discussion, a steering committee (SC) should be formed for ALL of those who wish to serve on that committee,
7) 3 days after formation, giving time for campaigning, the first meeting should be convened where each member will formally introduce themselves to the SC and indicate what skill, experiences, talents, and/or resources he or she wishes to contribute to the foundation.  For example: Hi, I'm Bob Jones, email: bob.Jones@gmail.com, owner of Bob's Bits, a bitcoin exchange; I'm a CPA and I would like to run for treasurer and chair the finance committee, I've worked for ...   This introduction can be done in different ways, email, skype, forum, or many other ways. 
8 ) After everyone has been introduced to the SC.  Someone (anyone) should move that an election be held immediately to determine the leadership of the SC.   
9) Vote immediately for 3 leaders, in case of a tie create a fair tie breaker
10) After the 3 leaders are elected, the three should vote for Chair, Vice Chair, and 2nd VC of the SC. 
11) After formation of the leadership, the leadership should form: a bylaw committee, a finance committee, a election committee, and any other committee(s) they feel necessary for the formation of the foundation. 
12)  After all of the committee formed the Chair should determine the committed chairs for each committee. 
13)  Each committee chair should solicit the help from the SC population for committee membership to help determine goals for each committee and to achieve those goals by the next meeting 20 days later.   The leadership should be available to assist all committees
14)  At the next meeting it should be announced :
           -  a name, website address, and email address for the foundation,
           -  the bylaws for the foundation have been determined
           -  $X amount of funds have been collected 
           -  Y# of members
           -  a formal election of board members has been scheduled for ____ date
 and     - any other info to report

15) after each report the chair of that committee should move for adoption of that report and recommend it be accepted by the full committee.  The motion should be seconded, and a majority vote of the full SC will determine the fate of the motion. 
16) after all reports are adopted the meeting is adjourned until the date of the election of the board members.  The bylaws will pickup from there





If done right, it will be very, very, hard work,  you will make many friends and a couple enemies (some for no reason at all), you will have the transparency, you will have the necessary leadership, you will have your goals, and you will have a way of achieving those goals.

After the positive feedback shown Ive decided to push ahead with this venture. I like some of your ideas and will be a great template for something that we can do. I have no interest in being a board member on this foundation Im supporting it as Its badly needed. Alot of faith has been lost with the current Bitcoin foundation

It is possible to alienate spam accounts by having each votetlogged via mac id. Of course this can be circumvented by those using multiple devices, but how many can people reasonably log into and vote on? 4? 10? I wouldnt say more than 10.

This can be perhaps be negated by having a set vote time for only a short duration. I.e A 1 hour window to cast votes.


Alternatively the selection could be made randomly. This may seem daft but would it really be?
Imagine 40 people put their names forward-  20 Bitcoin Businesses, and 20 individuals. 5 from each could be selected randomly online via a live stream. This would remove the element of vote rigging and as its random we would be calling up possibly ever aspect of the community.

This thread is mostly to gather the thoughts on the community regarding a new foundation with a little bit of brainstorming.

Im sure there is a workable way to do this.

The current foundation has 3 board seats for non-industry members. 3 seats for industry. 1 seat for a tie breaker. Anyone can run for election for 6 of the seats, member or not...but only members vote. Terms are 2 years.

Oooh, oooh!

PICK ME! PICK ME!!

Supreme Emporer of Bitcoin, BELIATHON!!

 ;D

...too much?

Well this is hard to do. Who would we nominate?
Not everyone should be allowed to vote. Not everyone qualifies to vote. We don't need random people from the altcoin (hello doge community, no offence) voting for randoms.
First the current Foundation has to be disbanded. I'm not sure how we can get this to happen either.

And can i ask..the most important question: Are their accounts publicly available for scrutiny~? There is a big difference between the proposed and the current. The proposed would be a Non Profit Organisation, would not have matt 'i lost all your money' karpeles on it and would have public accounts. Where do all the donations go? In someones pocket?

I think we can operate along side it. The current foundation will die a slow death if donations cease. The first objective will be to get a site up and running (which is in the works as we speak) and a forum for ideas to be debated and decided upon. With alot of hard work, transparency and honesty we can make the old foundation redundant.

You're building a site while nobody has agreed on who will lead nor who will be in this Foundation?
That makes sense.

MAC id can easy be spoofed. It is somewhat difficult to "steal" mac id from someone (it is what mac id does, provide a way to uniquely identify devices on a network. But assuming a random (and propably unique) mac id is really easy

This would not prevent people from using bots to cast multiple votes within that timeframe. Captcha can prevent bots, but cannon prevent people from hiring people for casting votes for them. Or event do it for free if there is an incentive to do so.
A few years ago, the Times "online person of the year" vote was completely rigged by 4chaners who casted thousands of vote to put some peoples in 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc... place such as the first letter of their names would spell a word. All that for free, despite a captcha, only for the lulz.


Then you're just shifting the problem. If someone is able to create 100 fake identities for himself, he has 100 times more chances to be randomly picked.

In fact maybe he me be picked multiple times. Unless those drafted are required to physically move to the foundation HQ, we cannot know. It's the same problem as with other solution.

I think that the problem of ensuring "one person, one vote" has been on people's mind since the dawn of Internet. A lot of smart people have spent countless hours trying to solve it, and nobody has ever found a satisfactory answer.

The closest we had is "proof of work", which essentially gave "one CPU, one vote"... Until people started  making ASIC to have more weight that everybody.

(I guess votes could be cast that way... Requiring people to solve a PoW problem of say... 30 minutes on average, during a voting period of 2 hours. If the problem is not SHA-256 based, then ASIC are useless; it could use scrypt... But it would be funny seeing the bitcoin foundation use scrypt.)

What I fail to see is how your "new" foudation would be better than the current one.

The current one's members are elected. Just as you propose. The current one's donations are publicitly available.

You don't like Karpeles on it?
1. You couldn't have know he'd fuck up when he was elected. It's alwayes a risk, a risk that would affect the "new" foundation too.
2. Don't vote for him when his seat gets re-elected.

You don't like their work?
I don't know what th've done wrong... They tried calming people when mtgox claimeda bug in the protocol. They gave thorough explanations! And they helped many people deal with malleability. But if mtgox acts stupid after all that, there is nkthing they can do.

The've sent people to Washington convincing lawmakers that cryptocurrencies are good. And their point of view was well recieved.

You think that malleability should have been solved by now since it was known since 2011?
1. Even if some developpers are on the foundation, the foundation are not the developpers.
2. Most developpers tought that even tough malleability was a poor design choice, it is not a "bug" per say since it does not prevent functionnality, if everybody implements the protocol correctly (i.e. Not expecting txid as immutable but instead checking for the spent status of inputs to know if the transaction went trough.). Not being a bug thus does not require being fixes.

I don't really know how they could have done better...

"If you build it they will come."


My reservation is that there is not enough of a ground swell for any community based organization, the current foundation is NOT community based, yet somehow people think that it should be treated as such.  

This thread needs a minimum of 100 SOLID members to publicly say yes they will support the effort before I feel comfortable that there is a reasonable basis for a community effort; someone else may feel 2 people is enough,  

More importantly, I believe that community efforts that grow out of negativity, protest, revolution, or hate are often short lived, or quickly sidelined, or become insignificant fast.    Community efforts that grow from positivity often result in slow widespread and long-term adoption.

Wow, you joined the forum 8 days ago and already trying to stage a coup.

What about the remaining 96% of the world population? What is the U.S. based Bitcoin foundation doing?

We as humans living in advanced societies are CONDITIONED to operate top down leadership communities, we are accustomed to complaining from the bottom up, so when a problem exists the NORMAL thing to do is complaint to management.

The FOUNDATION positioned themselves as major management for major bitcoin matters, as such when the Silk Road issue came to fore, the foundation was expected to move on it, likewise it is expected to make a meaningful move on Mt Gox.  If it cannot, will not, and/or should not do so then perhaps they should reconsider how they want to be viewed in the bitcoin community.

I'm a proponent for self-regulation, Mt Gox screwed up, nevertheless they pointed to a known and existing problem, and made it a major issue.    Any board member that makes a big deal out of ANYTHING that results in the widespread disruption of the market the issue MUST be investigated and acted upon.    If it is determined by the board that the problem was NOT a major problem and that the board member acted irresponsibly they must remove that individual from the board.   OTOH if the board determines that the board members actions were valid then they need to stand by that member in a major way for the stability of the market.   If on the odd chance that they find that the board member cried foul BUT the no confidence vote went in his favor, then they should tacitly support the board member from a distance, in which case the board takes the heat with the board member.

They can take another no-confidence vote if they wish.

You can't really let some new comers create the new Foundation either.

Everything in cryptocurrency land is "NEW".

The person with the absolute most exp in the bitcoin world only has 5 yrs exp; 
this forum is 3 yrs old,  and the bitcoin foundation website is only 2.

It was only MONTHS ago when bitcoin was in double digits across the board, and single digits about a year ago.


All things considered, tenure is not relevant.

Absolutely. The notion that one needs to be here for a set time to have a sense of entitlement is exactly what should be discouraged

No. You're new, and you probably have 1/10th of the knowledge that some experienced members here have (I won't mention any names though).

What would the purpose of a "New" Foundation be?

The Foundation's origin was/is based around a core group of developers and business partners with the purpose of enabling a more democratic representation to the open source project we know as Bitcoin.

So it would seem that the BEST way to circumvent the existing collaboration would be:

1 - Establish a team of technical resources that can execute updates and enhancements in a more timely fashion
2 - Garner the support of said technical team from a few substantial business partners that support the new direction

There is no reason why there has to only be ONE Bitcoin open source project. Start a new one and have it compete and succeed against the existing client.

It does not seem to me that the Foundation has any real authority or power over the Bitcoin code (anyone can download it and re-release it), so just create your own project and organization.

A new foundation should focus on furthering  Bitcoin's integration into the mainstream. Its difference between the old model would be that: Members are chosen by the majority and each seat is on a temporary basis;  not self appointed. Accounts are public and with expenditure being properly scrutinised. It is a NON PROFIT organisation. It would engage with the community on a  frequent basis and consult on projects that would be a sensible use of funds. i.e marketing and facilities; new atms, bitcoin banners and logos being put in shop stores that accept it...

I feel right now, that Bitcoin is not being served correctly. It is a fanstastic concept that needs coordinated activity so that it can succeed. It is being pressured from all sides; incompetent exchange managers, fraudsters exploiting it, hackers seeking to disrupt it and the media attempting to destroy it.

This foundation rarely engages with this this community, nor do they listen to use. Else mister Gox wouldn't be on the board any more.

A board, a foundation, and especially a board of a foundation are inherently charged with doing the right thing, and setting a right example.  

how much tenure do you think it takes to do the right thing?

how much knowledge do you think it takes to do the right thing?

The CEO of Mt. Gox has arguably more bitcoin knowledge than 99.9% of the cryptocurrency industry, but clearly not enough to steer his ship straight,
the same could be said of BitInstant CEO, who was not only a foundation board member but also a founding member and vice Chair at the time of his resignation.  

If you have ALL OF THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE UNIVERSE but not enough to do the right thing, you're only good to lawyers wanting billable hours, not to the public.

99.9% of the crypto industry? More like 0.99%.

If you read https://bitcoinfoundation.org/about/governance (https://bitcoinfoundation.org/about/governance), you would know that the members of the foundations are not self appointed, they are elected. And that their tenure lasts 2 years. The current one finishes this July.

Mister Gox for example was elected. You just have to not vote for him when his seat is open again. If people were removed from office each time they displeased somebody, then nobody would ever hold a seat more than a day. Gox fucked up, and I will not vote for him again. But I see no problem of him finishing his term, especially since it is soon.

I have not seen the foundation being overly friendly with gox eighter: with all the malleability incident, they have been pretty clear that it is gox that fucked up, even if gox's boss is on the board.

I don't mind people creating a new foundation: The more people wanting to spend time furthering bitcoin's cause the better.

But I don't like gratuitous bashing of the current foundation, for all I have read here against them is eighter vague assumptions, or plain lies.