Good point!
I think consensus-based system would work better in some cases while creating unnecessary complexity in other. I don't insist at all. It will find its place eventually if people find it useful.

I was thinking along the lines of paying membership fee once per year and voting as many times as the need arises within that year. Also the fee is not refundable, so if the person or group decides to leave the system not only do they loose the benefits that the system provides they also loose their membership fee.
That should provide some stickiness to the system so it won't fall apart at the earliest occasion.

Consensus should be achieved by majority of votes which are all equal as the fee paid to enable this ability was also equal. I think it better keep it that way or otherwise big money will simply buy the outcome of the vote.


Registering id tokens would probably create unnecessary centralization.
With Bitcoin private keys both parts of the fee structure could be decentralized.

For the voting part of the fee votes (messages signed with private key) would be cast into a P2P overlay network and land into a common repository shared among all the peers. It should be fairly easy to defend against spamming. Every node must check that the message is signed with the address that paid a full membership voting fee to a fixed public address within a year and check against repository that message hasn't been received already. If any of these conditions fail the message will not be re-broadcast.

For the benefits part of the fee members simply come to the nodes that "distribute" the benefits and claim their part by signing the message with the private key of the address they used to pay their membership benefits fee from. If one of the benefits, for example, is the school built with the organization's budget then claiming that benefit would simply be going into that school after confirming your membership with your private key.



I need to look more into how pirate party is organized.
They should definitely like to play and experiment with these ideas.
I thought that Bitcoin Foundation would also make a perfect example of this system.

Also instead of having a centralized treasurer to manage the budget I lean more towards having multiple secretaries as representatives of smaller subgroups within the system each having control of a single private key of a common multisig address. So that any decisions to spend budget would need to be authorized by all secretaries of the subgroups. They would not have to argue but simply execute already achieved consensus.

In case if one of the multisig private keys is lost or destroyed there needs to be an underground vault with the full release key from the whole budget buried deep enough that stealing it would require a noticeable amount of time. Any unauthorized attempts to unearth it would be noticed and prevented.

This approach definitely has merit and I like it.
The problem arises when there are conflicts like who will build the road, who will build the school in a particular place, who decides that there is a need for road or school and how money we chip in towards these goals are going to be spent.
I look at this from the position that there is no central authority to decide that.


The consensus-based system I'm describing works best when it starts small - the smallest unit would probably be a family, then neighborhood, then small village. If there is a tendency to grow it'd probably be better to keep original hierarchy in place (with local consensus rules) when communities join.
This way it would be easier to manage.

Also, the voting repository might need to be maintained in a decentralized manner and then there would be several servers with HTML interface to view it and work with it to verify (something like blockexplorer.com for blockchain). If there is a need for politician in this system it would be a simple role of secretary to execute non-decentralizable parts (if there are any) of the achieved consensus. Any deviation in execution from the achieved consensus would be immediately noticed.

The amount of coins collected through membership fees would constitute the organization's budget and it would need to be held in a public multisig address with multiple private keys spread across different secretaries of sub-communities in the hierarchy. But the whole structure and topology of the system is not enforced in the design itself - it is going be the choice of the people participating in it. They will decide whether to join or to split or to leave this system completely.

The part of the trust-free mechanism is derived from the fact that votes come from the addresses that paid the membership fee with a currency spendable on a global market.
This removes the necessity of maintaining a separate database connecting "who paid the fee" with "who has voting tokens". I need to look more into Namecoins though. Last time I read about them there was a discussion whether they need to be destroyed or not when they are spent, that was probably a year ago.
Could you please describe the voting mechanism as you see it with Namecoins?


Regarding identifying members vs anonymity of votes there is indeed at least one problem.
If the system provides benefits to members (pensions, sick leaves, etc) there needs to be a way to
identify who is eligible to receive them. At this point I can think of the following approach:
Split the membership fee into (a) public part and (b) voting part.
Those members who paid the public part of the fee become eligible to the benefits of the system. The voting part of the fee is anonymous and voting itself doesn't make any member eligible to any benefits just influence the voting outcome. I think it would be safe to assume that number of voting members should be less than or equal to the number of publicly registered members. On a local scale community needs to be cautious to an outside influence in the voting process, however on a large or global scale rigging the vote outcome becomes prohibitively difficult cost-wise since underlying monetary system has limited supply.


I agree this would be an interesting challenge. People need time to do actual work too, not just chatting the whole day about how they are going to vote. The basic concept I can think of is that members send proposals of the change they are willing to make to an already existing consensus with a schedule to vote at least one week (or even month) ahead. If within this period enough members approve that the community indeed needs to look at this issue then the proposal is added into the voting queue.
Sort of how WEB2.0 content management and rating system is working today.

PS: on the side note...
Another area where this system can also be applicable is a company/corporation. Right now corporations are modeled after the idea of central governance - there is one chap at the top who issues commands to his "generals" and those in turn are in charge of small armies of developers which normally have no say at all. For people with libertarian mindset it might be hard to accept any managerial authority on top of them who would tell them what to do on a day-to-day basis. The system with provable trust-free way to achieve consensus might be easier to swallow. As an example, imagine working on something like building a Boeing 747. That would require a lot of people from many different areas of expertise to do a lot of work in a very coordinated fashion or it simply won't fly.

Unlike "democracy" (the loaded word I really wanted to avoid), the system I'm describing and society built around it is self-enforcing. Everybody has an equal access to the voting repository, everybody is free to find and point out the discrepancies in any course of action taken by other members. So it will only work if enough people would be willing it to work and if this system turns out to provide more benefits and better life than any other system or no system at all.

Consensus is a shared understanding of how to proceed working together.
If working together for certain individuals is not possible then consensus for them is to not work together.

PS: I haven't looked up the definition of consensus in any dictionary yet, I just made it up myself

Yes, as I've already pointed out people have a choice to accept the result of the vote even if they disagree and stay within the community if benefits of staying out-weight the downsides of the vote or leave and search for better life. Spending a lot of time to achieve consensus is also an option but it might end up in an infinite loop with circular arguments and nothing will ever get done.

I'm not saying that the mechanism I'm describing is the only way to achieve consensus. In smaller groups a simpler approach might work as well, while it would require some trust in persons handling the voting if there is a voting to begin with.

The goal is to have a trust-free way to achieve consensus via voting.
Maybe it's a better wording than 'provably-fair' even though it is still provable.

EDIT: I have renamed the thread to replace 'fair' with 'trust-free'

It has also been proven that there is no solution to Byzantine Generals problem, yet here we are with Bitcoin as living example of how it actually works.

The whole point is to have a convenient and reliable system where people themselves can vote for things that matter to them and not delegate their power to politicians. Think along the lines of dedicating 10 minutes of your time every evening at your computer to vote for something you care about.


I can start with simple example - there is a need to patch the road shared by 10 families in the neighborhood, nobody else uses that road (so they don't really care) and there is no central authority to call for. How would those families achieve consensus of who does what and who pays what.
It could be that one good guy just goes ahead and fixes it for everybody to benefit from it, but if that doesn't happen there needs to be a reliable mechanism to achieve consensus.


There is no forcing of anyone to do anything. People who agreed to participate in the system would have an option to either accept the result of the vote even if they disagree with it or leave that particular consensus-society or never even consider participating in any to begin with. The idea is that people need other people to survive, to grow food, to build houses and those who will learn how to achieve consensus while working together in a most constructive way will prosper and flourish and show an example to other people how things can be done, not that other people have to necessarily follow that example.


I simply meant that the system cannot be rigged/hijacked with fraudulent votes.
It is 'fair' only in that sense and no other meaning was intended.
I think the 4th paragraph in OP describes the mechanism with enough details.

There is nothing about forcing this system against any other system, that decision would simply be left for free market to demonstrate which system works best. I only wanted to point out that with Bitcoin we now have a technical solution to voting problem that never existed before.


The course of action that people will take in any situation will only reflect their level of development.
If they are aggressive and operate from the position of fear that there isn't enough for everyone we might observe what you just quoted. But it doesn't have to be that way if people want to build things and improve their way of life by using expertise and labor of other people in a consensus-based reality.


This is one of the general misconceptions that there is some 'government operation' and that 'they' know better than 'us' what is best for 'us'. If you delegate that decision making process of what is best for you to other people then you probably expect that those people know you better than you know yourself, which is frankly ridiculous. You are your government, you are your authority, you are unique point of view, you are particular perspective of the infinite - cherish your existence!

Yes, the system is completely voluntary.
Two neighborhoods may vote within themselves to join forces, for example, and those who were opposed to this decision are free to leave and create their own neighborhood or stay alone.

Also, as the neighborhoods grow to the point where they can successfully defend their territory this may give rise to a notion of land ownership. Simply if you occupy the land and can defend it - it's yours.
Over time this system should stabilize and provide some consensus of who owns what and there finally be peace on Earth!

Yes, the votes can still be as anonymous as Bitcoin addresses, so it will be hard to pressure people.
Also it is better to start with small local communities/neighborhoods where people know each other and the total number of members is limited and known, so that system would be hard to hijack from outside.

It's actually perfectly inline with AnCap. I highly doubt that without the government society will consist of lonely strangers. There will still be families, there will still be neighborhoods and they would want to resolve conflicts in a civilized manner. The idea in OP could provide one of the possible solutions.

Sure!
You won't be able to vote, but if you don't want to/don't care it's totally ok.

EDIT:
This might give an answer to the questions like "who will build the roads?" and
"who will look after the old and sick?"
Also it doesn't need to get big or centralized, it can start as your local neighborhood of 10 families and stay that way.

Instead of randomly electing people and giving away our power to them,
how about we keep the power to ourselves and solve the problems in a consensus-based manner.

For that we need a total transparency for (a) money transfers and (b) provable trust-free voting.
Bitcoin solves the (a) part of the problem, so we only need to create a solution for (b)

I've already proposed this in Bitcoin Foundation thread a couple of times so I will repeat it here.
It is possible for an organization with membership paid in Bitcoin to create a system with provable trust-free voting.

In this system all membership fees are collected into a single public Bitcoin address and votes are the messages signed with the private keys of the addresses that sent a full membership fee to that address.
The whole repository of these messages along with their Bitcoin addresses is then made public.
This will allow every individual member to check that his/her vote is correct and also verify that other votes come from legit members (those who paid the fee) and they in turn can verify that their vote is correct.

The members of that organization/society can then vote for variety of different things: decide where money need to be spent and how, appoint people to lead different projects to achieve certain goals and so on.
All the money flow will be transparent because the fee collection address is public.
It probably needs to be protected with multisig so that no single person can run away with the funds, but that is one of the technical details that can be worked out along the way.

Instead of randomly selecting people and giving away our power to them,
how about we keep the power to ourselves and solve the problems in a consensus-based manner.

For that we need a total transparency for (a) money transfers and (b) provably-fair voting.
Bitcoin solves the (a) part of the problem, so we only need to create a solution for (b)

I've already proposed this in Bitcoin Foundation thread a couple of times so I will repeat it here.
It is possible for an organization with membership paid in Bitcoin to create a system with provably-fair voting.

In this system all membership fees are collected into a single public Bitcoin address and votes are the messages signed with the private keys of the addresses that sent a full membership fee to that address.
The whole repository of these messages along with their Bitcoin addresses is then made public.
This will allow every individual member to check that his/her vote is correct and also verify that other votes come from legit members (those who paid the fee) and they in turn can verify that their vote is correct.

The members of that organization/society can then vote for variety of different things: decide where money need to be spent and how, appoint people to lead different projects to achieve certain goals and so on.
All the money flow will be transparent because the fee collection address is public.
It probably needs to be protected with multisig so that no single person can run away with the funds, but that is one of the technical details that can be worked out along the way.

EDIT: I created a separate thread for this idea, since it is quite different from the one proposed in OP.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=124477.0

There are at least 5 vendors for Bitcoin ASICs, one of them in China in the process of tapeout.
I can't see all of them to be scam, to be honest.

As MrTeal pointed out, Litecoin ASICs would need to compete with GPUs at what GPUs have perfected over a long period of time i.e. working with large amounts of high-bandwidth memory, while still remaining cheap to manufacture. Not likely to happen any time soon if ever.

GPU mining won't go away with advent of ASICs.
Litecoin was specifically designed to take on that job.

If one compares the sheer number of GPUs out there and the number of ASICs that will come out of foundries by the end of the year and within next year, one can clearly see that GPU mining is still going to be the biggest game in town for a long time. It won't be mining Bitcoins though.

If anything GPUs won't suddenly disappear, they will simply change hands.

Another strong point of Litecoin is that you have a performance of an SPV/lightweight node with a benefit of a full validating node at the moment. The whole Litecoin blockchain downloads from scratch within minutes!

Some might argue that it's not used as widely as Bitcoin and it will likely change in the future.
However Litecoin has a great chance of adopting Bitcoin optimizations earlier in its evolution without ever getting heavy, hence the name.

Regarding proof-of-stake in general and PPCoin in particular, there is at least one flaw that hasn't been addressed. Mining is ultimately what gives coins scarcity. The computing resources on the planet are limited and therefore cannot be inflated to infinity, only redistributed between different tasks.

Without mining in the long run nothing will prevent multiple proof-of-stake schemes to be created out-of-thin-air and exist simultaneously. They all can be "mined" with stakes from the same computer.
The rate of adoption might become the only limiting factor in this case and it might actually work.
The upside is that nobody has to bother with setting up hardware and therefore more people can participate in stake-mining thus strengthening the distributed nature of the system.
Only time will tell which coins end up in the winners category.

PS: The above inflation argument doesn't apply to merged-mining as all merged-mined coins are at the mercy of the biggest chain and can be shutdown by large pools at will.

+1 to BlackBison

The other thing why diversity is important which isn't always brought up in discussions is that altchains help alleviate initial distribution problem - more different coins getting in the hands of more different people is a very good thing for overall cryptocurrency ecosystem.

PS: on the side note - Litecoins rock!
Just compare ASIC mining community and GPU mining community in size and make your mind

Good post and good initiative!
I might add that Bitcoin is recognized and being displayed at British Museum:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=122274.0