Bitcoin's killer app: Pooling your bitcoins, using the blockchain to vote

[Elwar]

BitPools (http://www.bitpools.com) is a way to pool your bitcoins with other people to solve a problem, using the Bitcoin blockchain to vote on a solution.

Let me know what you think.

[WillShill4BTC]

This is and always was an outstanding idea, if ahead of its time.
I'm annoyed - you won't be needing my services.

[Swordsoffreedom]

Think you can apply it to online voting for elections
Can see poll stations finally becoming legacy items

[jeliman]

very interesting...

why not voting outside the cryptoworld, like elections

some sidechain project might solve that too i guess..

[Swordsoffreedom]

very interesting...

why not voting outside the cryptoworld, like elections

some sidechain project might solve that too i guess..

Well I saw a few projects around that idea but not to scale
Thinking that this could be put to scale perhaps with a tinker or two

[Elwar]

Think you can apply it to online voting for elections
Can see poll stations finally becoming legacy items

BitPools is more about empowering people instead of giving power to another entity through a majority vote.

I can see the need for polling station finally becoming legacy items.

[jeliman]

Think you can apply it to online voting for elections
Can see poll stations finally becoming legacy items

BitPools is more about empowering people instead of giving power to another entity through a majority vote.

I can see the need for polling station finally becoming legacy items.

what kind of entity you mean?

By giving people the tool to vote this way, you sort of empower them anyway, regardless of the subject they vote on

[Elwar]

Think you can apply it to online voting for elections
Can see poll stations finally becoming legacy items

BitPools is more about empowering people instead of giving power to another entity through a majority vote.

I can see the need for polling station finally becoming legacy items.

what kind of entity you mean?

By giving people the tool to vote this way, you sort of empower them anyway, regardless of the subject they vote on

BitPools allows you to vote with your bitcoins. Instead of an entity that would take your money and then allow you to vote for the person that gets to spend it.

[Swordsoffreedom]

Think you can apply it to online voting for elections
Can see poll stations finally becoming legacy items

BitPools is more about empowering people instead of giving power to another entity through a majority vote.

I can see the need for polling station finally becoming legacy items.

Thanks for clarifying looks like a neat project regardless, a distributed voting system using Bitcoin based tech

Yah polling stations becoming legacy items would impact voter participation in interesting ways no real excuse not to be a bit engaged other than protest, bring the digital age to elections.

Still I wish you the best of luck with your project and it looks interesting to me can see it makes sense for group buys
Think the MSC protocol has similar technical aspects as seen in the Maidsafe IPO but this is convenient for smaller scale distributions

Would have saved a heck of a lot of time for manual sends on the BTC side of that IPO if something like this was set up there though

[Elwar]

Would have saved a heck of a lot of time for manual sends on the BTC side of that IPO if something like this was set up there though

Ya, there have been a lot of projects that would have benefited a lot from this...anyone that wants a project with a lot of people funding a single goal.

At least now it will be available.

[Elwar]

Signing  up is very easy, I value the ability to be anonymous so no e-mail is required. Just a username and password.

[matt608]

This is great!  Does the amount pledged decide the 'weight' of the vote?  Otherwise people could make many tiny donations to get more votes and game the system.

[Elwar]

This is great!  Does the amount pledged decide the 'weight' of the vote?  Otherwise people could make many tiny donations to get more votes and game the system.

When there is a proposal, the person creating the proposal sets the minimum vote amount (ie 100 mBTC) and either a goal amount (ie 1000 mBTC) or a percentage of pool members (ie 50%).

If you wanted, you could certainly vote several times (and I plan on making that simpler than creating separate accounts) but all you are doing is spending more money. But this could be desirable if you were voting on creating a new company and you wanted more "shares" of the company (ie Creating a Bitcoin Video game company, etc).

[keithers]

I really really love this idea, because I always question the validity of votes and elections.   There is literally no accountability for elections right now...

[pabpete]

This is a great idea!

[counter]

Clever idea.  I very much look forward to trying this service. 

[freedomno1]

Technical Question where would I place a voting mechanism
Thinking Uses the Bitcoin Network and Uses the Bitcoin Currency so internal mechanism for Bitcoin
Which is neat since Bitcoin needs its own mechanism to do this  

[Elwar]

Technical Question where would I place a voting mechanism
Thinking Uses the Bitcoin Network and Uses the Bitcoin Currency so internal mechanism for Bitcoin
Which is neat since Bitcoin needs its own mechanism to do this 

Bottom left, uses the Bitcoin Network and the Bitcoin Currency.

That is the great thing about BitPools, it uses the most secure ledger in the world to store the votes which are both transparent and anonymous.

No changes to the Bitcoin core needed, from the ground up everything is built around the advantages of the blockchain technology.

[nuhash]

How would you restrict votes to one per person? Or is this supposed to work like kickstarter?

EDIT:nevermind, i watched the video and it does appear to work like kickstarter

[freedomno1]

Technical Question where would I place a voting mechanism
Thinking Uses the Bitcoin Network and Uses the Bitcoin Currency so internal mechanism for Bitcoin

Bottom left, uses the Bitcoin Network and the Bitcoin Currency.

That is the great thing about BitPools, it uses the most secure ledger in the world to store the votes which are both transparent and anonymous.

No changes to the Bitcoin core needed, from the ground up everything is built around the advantages of the blockchain technology.

Thanks for clarifying I was having a bit of conflict in classifying it since it has applications that seem similar to sidechains but not entirely
It could be developed to use the bitcoin currency but independent of the network
That said since bitpools uses Bitcoin and is based on Bitcoin as a currency it should be in the Bitcoin category which means it needs a sublevel

Was reading up on sidechains a bit so it was why I was a bit confused particularly the paragraph below. That said it uses the main chain as the voting mechanism so cleared my own confusion on it.

Sidechains enable new features to be added to the bitcoin blockchain by interacting with Bitcoin.

It’s possible to bring all of these features to Bitcoin by using a two-way peg system. This means you could move your bitcoins from the original blockchain to a new sidechain in order to gain the added features of that sidechain without having to switch into a completely new currency. For example, you may have your savings in cold storage on the original Bitcoin blockchain, but it could make sense to pay for your morning coffee on a sidechain that focuses on enabling microtransactions. Bitcoins retain their original value on each one of the sidechains, and this system also preserves the idea of having a hard limit on 21 million bitcoins that can be sent through all of the different sidechains rather than inflating the total number of cryptocoins with each new feature, (Interpretation) another example of this is building voting systems that rely on the Bitcoin Blockchain and its security using the cryptography of the network to solve a problem, using the Bitcoin blockchain to vote on a solution but keeping the hard limit of 21 million bitcoins.
So could see a line there based on the interpretation since the hard limit is kept, but I agree with your point.

From the Adam beck article
http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/news/adam-back-sidechains-can-replace-altcoins-bitcoin-2-0-platforms/2014/04/10