Author: Billy Tetrud 2022-03-22 15:19:30
Published on: 2022-03-22T15:19:30+00:00
The discussion revolves around the concept of using transactions for polls and signaling. The proposed idea is a coin-weighted signature-based poll that is not vulnerable to sybil attacks. This system requires every pollee to sign messages for each UTXO they want to respond to the poll with, and the signed message is valid only while that UTXO has not been spent. Poll results are considered at each particular block height, and support and opposition responses are weighted by the UTXO amount and the support/oppose fraction in the message. However, there are potential issues with this proposal such as public key exposure prior to spending for current addresses, which could be addressed by creating a new address type with two public keys/spend paths: one for spending and one for signing. Another sub-issue is that if a long-term-cold-storage UTXO has a signaling pubkey, indicating it might require a softfork which poses a chicken-and-egg problem.The conversation also touches upon the semantics of key ownership and the usefulness of human-readable messages in poll messages. It is argued that the proposed polling system may not work well with the Lightning Network (LN) since LN forwards require invalidations of previous signals also on-chain, defeating the purpose of avoiding on-chain transactions. Additionally, the semantic consideration of "cold" and "hot" keys in vault constructions poses a challenge since the "cold" key wants to be kept offline as much as possible for security. Moreover, vault owners might not want to vote because of the risk, and their weight might be enough to be important in the voting scheme. The possibility of storing data on-chain or in a separate chain is discussed, as well as the potential use of proof-of-stake for voting. The concept of merged signing is briefly mentioned as being different from the proposed idea. Overall, the discussion offers insights into the technical and practical considerations involved in implementing a poll and signaling mechanism for Bitcoin.
Updated on: 2023-06-15T17:55:00.882715+00:00