Bitcoin Forum

I just finished the alpha version of www.BitcoinVoice.com (http://www.BitcoinVoice.com)

The recent debates about SegWit, Hardforking, etc and concerns about astroturfing led me to look for some way to cut through the bullshit. I wanted to build a platform where we could gauge the Bitcoin community's opinions, but in a way that's verifiable and meaningful; immune to astroturfing.

So I've spent the past few weeks putting together BitcoinVoice. Basically it's a list of polls, and anyone can vote in them. Votes are cast using Bitcoin signatures, so they can be verified. Each vote is weighted by the balance of the associated address. Proof of Stake without protocol changes! :P

I'm calling this an alpha release. It works just fine, but ... it's ugly as hell :P Sorry! Feedback, comments, etc are totally welcome! Please let me know what you think.

I really hope this can be useful!

Thanks for reading!

NOTE: The friendly folks over at #bitcoin informed me that a similar site already exists over at bitcoin.com ... which I didn't know about.  I guess ... at least BitcoinVoice isn't bitcoin.com? :P

Bitcoin.com is owned by Roger Ver, who has a very large amount of coins and openly supports big blocks.  It's possible that he signed with his own addresses, in which case the vote was void (because he owns more BTC than the amount used in the vote).

It's essential to have a neutral site on this.  The question is whether people would trust a smaller site to protect their privacy when they prove ownership of large quantities of Bitcoin.

There's also the fact that the economy doesn't have to dictate everything, because that would favour richer people.

The only information I get from "voters" is a Bitcoin address, a signature, and an IP.  There's not much privacy to be lost there (besides, I don't log IP with the votes).  If users are concerned about IP, they can just hit the site through a proxy/Tor.

Yeah, I've struggled with this.  Thing is, though, Bitcoin as it exists today is already dictated by Proof of Stake.  For those who believe that miners control Bitcoin, Proof of Work is just a proxy for Proof of Stake.  A really poor proxy.  The more money you have, the more mining power you can buy.  But Proof of Work puts a layer of ASIC between, which is why it's a poor proxy.

For those who believe the economic powers of Bitcoin control the network (ala BIP148), that's also a proxy for Proof of Stake.  The economic powers are usually also the ones with a lot of coin.

It'd be nice if we had a Proof of Person system.  1 vote per human.  Democracy.  But that's not feasible in a decentralized system.  So we ultimately depend on alternatives, most of which are just forms of Proof of Stake.

You can cheat mining power, you can manipulate the number of full nodes, but you can't fake Proof of Stake.