[Pre-BIP] Community Consensus Voting System

Summary:

The Bitcoin community has proposed two ideas for “on-chain” voting, both of which do not require changes to the software. The first involves using proof of stake; supporters can move their bitcoin into their own vanity address and then a website can be created to display matching addresses and explain how to add your “financial power vote.” The second option is for individuals who want to “buy votes” by using their funds in marketing efforts to promote the proposal they support. While the first method requires people to control bitcoin in order to represent support, the second can be abused. A work-in-progress BIP (Community Consensus Voting System) has been proposed that will allow developers to measure support for BIPs prior to implementation. Currently, there is no way to measure consensus for potential changes to the Bitcoin protocol, which is especially problematic for controversial changes like the max block size limit. The CCVS will allow the general public, miners, companies using Bitcoin, and developers to vote for their preferred BIP in a way that’s public and relatively difficult to manipulate. Each competing BIP will be assigned a unique bitcoin address, with anyone who wants to vote casting their ballot by sending 0.0001 BTC to their preferred BIP’s address. Confirmed Vote Multiplier would be given to mining pools, companies using Bitcoin, and Core maintainers/contributors, and would be worth 10,000 times a regular vote. However, the purpose of the confirmed vote multiplier is twofold: it gives a larger voice to organizations and the people who will have to do the work to implement whatever BIP the community prefers, and it negates the effect of anyone trying to skew the results by voting repeatedly. There is a desire for any full node running an up-to-date blockchain to also be able to vote with a multiplier, but as this would require code changes, it is currently outside the scope of this BIP.

Updated on: 2023-06-11T21:22:26.368775+00:00