Author: vjudeu at gazeta.pl 2022-03-22 16:37:01
Published on: 2022-03-22T16:37:01+00:00
In an email exchange, the possibility of using Bitcoin transactions for voting was discussed. Concerns were raised about the potential for someone to capture and broadcast poll messages. A suggestion was made to sign transactions or observe mempool to receive new blocks and use existing transactions to signal for or against something instead of moving real bitcoins. However, signed transactions may not be valid everywhere depending on what is signed and how it is signed. The suggestion was made to sign whole transactions rather than just custom data to make signatures compatible with the "signet way of making signatures" used in the signet challenge. To address the need for an on-chain transaction, it was suggested that people could attach commitments at the same cost and size as regular transactions, thereby reducing on-chain fees. Old poll data was considered not very practically useful compared to recent poll data, so there was no need to keep it on an immutable ledger. The risks associated with using a hot key as a poll-signing key were considered small given the time-bound and non-binding nature of polls. Regarding the method of indicating that a long-term-cold-storage UTXO has a signaling pubkey, it was suggested that taproot could enable this mechanism without a soft fork. A tapleaf could contain the data necessary to validate a signaling signature, with the merkle path to the tapleaf included in the poll message. To make signatures useless in a different context than voting, adding an "OP_RETURN" message to their input was suggested. Finally, the idea of using Proof of Stake was discussed, with the suggestion that it would simply involve proof of coin ownership.The email exchange also discusses a proposed coin-weighted signature-based poll that could be used as an information gathering mechanism, but not necessarily for voting. The proposal includes the option of adding human-readable messages to poll responses to gain insight into why people support or reject a particular change. The proposed system is not vulnerable to sybil attacks because it requires access to UTXOs and response-weight is directly tied to UTXO amount. However, there are potential issues with public key exposure and vault constructions. Additionally, ZmnSCPxj suggests that the proposal is similar to Merged Signing but clarifies that the two ideas are different in that no special commitments need to be made for the proposal.
Updated on: 2023-06-15T17:58:49.055159+00:00