Author: alp alp 2017-02-03 16:19:19
Published on: 2017-02-03T16:19:19+00:00
A proposal for a Community Consensus Voting System (CCVS) has been put forward to allow developers to measure support for Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) prior to implementation. The CCVS will enable the general public, miners, companies using Bitcoin, and developers to vote for their preferred BIP in a way that is public and relatively difficult to manipulate. Each competing BIP will be assigned a unique bitcoin address which is added to each header. Anyone who wants to vote can cast their ballot by sending a small amount (0.0001 btc) to their preferred BIP's address. Each transaction counts as one vote. Mining pools, companies using Bitcoin, and Core maintainers/contributors are allowed one confirmed vote each, which is worth 10,000 times a regular vote. Confirmed votes would be added to a new section in each respective BIP as a public record. Voting would run for a pre-defined period, ending when a particular block number is mined. Two ideas were suggested for "on-chain" voting. One idea requires people to control bitcoin in order to represent support, while the other allows those who want to "buy votes" to use their funds in marketing efforts to promote the proposal they support. However, this second method can be abused. The first method would require changes to the software, and counting actual, real people is still a technology in its infancy. One commentator disagreed with buying "votes" or portraying open standards as a voting process, and suggested some way for people to express their support weighed by coins (without losing/spending them), and possibly weighed by running a full node. This could be done by supporting message signatures somehow (ideally without using the same pubkey as spending), and some inherently unreliable, but perhaps useful if the community "colludes" to not-cheat, way to sign with ones' full node. It was noted that the BIP process already has BIP Comments for leaving textual opinions on the BIP unrelated to stake. There were several concerns raised about the proposal. For example, who decides on which companies are eligible, is there some kind of centralized database that one registers, who administers this, and what is to stop someone from creating a million fake companies to sway the voting? How does a company make its vote? How does one verify that the person voting on behalf of a company is actually the correct person?
Updated on: 2023-06-11T21:21:58.332381+00:00