Shower thought: bitcoin parliament

[adam440]

Hello, the never ending scaling debate and ever rising bitcoin fees are driving me crazy. I know we have UASF, but that's not the most elegant solution. So, I have a bold idea. What about establishing Bitcoin parliament. Instead of traditional political parties, there would be crypto parties (that's a horrible name, indeed). So there would be something like Bitcoin Core Party, BU Party, Bitcoin Classics Party and so on. And around 1/3 of the parliament would consist of independent representatives from industry (exchanges, mining, wallets and so on) and independent developers.

Thanks to a wide variety of people, we could have a really good discussion and mainly, if the parliament gain enough authority, results from debates in parliament could be actually implemented in the bitcoin code itself. This might really help with bitcoin development. All talks will be obviously online, with audio only (transmitting video from dozens of people at once is a bad idea).

The only problem is electing the parties. Which parties will have the privilege to talk at the bitcoin parliament, and how many people from each party. This might be a tough problem to solve. But this is just a crazy idea, isn't it?

Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6fuvez/shower_thought_bitcoin_parliament/?st=j3nc9u9p&sh=5a8f5c9f

[DooMAD]

That would be a colossal step backwards, IMO.  Crypto is vastly superior to elected representatives.  The thing we like to pretend is "democracy" at the moment is where a bunch of wealthy individuals and companies fund the election campaigns to effectively buy the policies they like best.  Everyone else gets to choose the bought puppet they detest the least.  It's just corruption by another name.  Why would you want to warp what we have here into that sorry mess?  Whales and early adopters would have too much power.

[Hydrogen]

If progress is your goal, one could say you cannot achieve true progress by repeating the same old, tired, mistakes of the past.

Parliament today represents a government organizational structure which opens borders and allows foreign invaders to enter to commit crime, murder and rape against a public which remains unarmed and unable to defend themselves.

If we're going to create a better future we cannot do it by using the old elitist style of thinking which the word "parliament" represents.

[franky1]

YOUR node is your representative / ballot vote on which manifesto should move things forward.

we do not need humans representing the network. the nodes themselves represent the network.

the blockstream/DCG group want a 'parliament'
where core is the house of commons with barry silbert as the speaker of the commons 'house' and DCG is the house of lords and alan silbert is the monarchy reigning over it all..

..
but using the parliament analogy.
if the network was parliament. then the 7000 full nodes are the representatives..

not humans around a table signing documents and making announcements.. just nodes..
yes there are different 'houses'.  pool nodes and user nodes. but they symbiotically need to come to a consensus agreement of new rules (laws)..

the benefit of using node consensus is that we dont need to rely on a group of people who meet up only a few times a year to make decisions for us where we only get one decision every 4-8 years of who is speaking for us at these round tables.

we get to ballot vote every block, for the things we want. and new rules(laws) happen when the votes of nodes display a clear majority agreement.

we need to get rid of the blockstream/DCG trojan that wants to bypass consensus and throw bombs around
we need to go back to using the real consensus mechanism

[d5000]

The only problem is electing the parties. Which parties will have the privilege to talk at the bitcoin parliament, and how many people from each party. This might be a tough problem to solve. But this is just a crazy idea, isn't it?

I consider this problem not only tough, but impossible to solve in a satisfying way. There are only three possibilities:

1) Vote by hashrate - so miners would be the powerful elite that elects the "Parliament";
2) Proof of stake - that would not only be a Plutarchy but give excessive power to bank-like actors (exchanges and payment processors)
3) Sacrifying anonymity/privacy and link the addresses to real identities, which is one of the core values of the community and would never gain approval by the majority of the users.

Vote by hashrate is already happening, with dissatisfying results and empowering only a very small elite. Proof of stake voting has been implemented in some altcoins (DPOS, NXT) but I consider it a no-go that banks have formally the most power on the election of a "politic" institution.

[odolvlobo]

... if the parliament gain enough authority, results from debates in parliament could be actually implemented in the bitcoin code itself. ...

It will never work.

Authority?  That is the problem that Bitcoin solves. Somebody dictating what goes into Bitcoin Core? If I don't like it, I'll just use something else.