In the anonymous bitcoin system only the proof of your skin in the game (stake) matters.
STAKE holders = COIN holders + HASH holders
No-one else matters and must not matter. Any attempts at governance, that do not adhere to this principle are going to fail.
Notable governance improvement initiatives:
Bitcoin Holders Parliament (same idea, but for coin holders)
miner staking - in order for miners to be able to claim the fees, they need to have certain amount of coins staked.
maintaining multiple independent node implementations
If you know of any others, that are in line with the above principles, please leave a comment.
FAQ
Q: Are you proposing some change in the protocol here?
A: No.
Q: Shouldn't a good voting system be based on the proof of your ability to enforce your will to be legitimate?
A: Coin holders can enforce their will by a split and market war, and hash holders by a hash war.
Q: How about other forms of stake - investment of time, social credit, future opportunity?
A: All of that is easily faked. None of that can be anonymously, measurably proven over the internet. Therefore irrelevant for governance, because you might be a saboteur pretending you care and are investing a lot of time. The blockstream/core gang seemed to be investing a lot of time and social credit, people listened to them and it resulted in a disaster. The BSV gang faked they represent a huge opportunity, people listened to them and it ended in a disaster.
Q: Are you saying individuals or companies that hold no coins yet, but represent an opportunity (planning to use BCH in a big way) are not valuable at all?
A: They are valuable as any other potential customer, nothing more (otherwise we get the BSV sabotage again). Customer surveys are a great thing (and we should certainly do more of them), but a very different thing to shareholder voting.
Q: Are you saying exchanges are not valuable/important/influential at all?
A: Exchanges are expected to vote with the coins they hold. This is a desired feature, not a bug, ..notice how people bring in the exchanges all the time when discussing governance? That is because unfortunately they really are very important for now. How it works currently is that the devs are making decisions with exchanges privately. Exchanges voting openly with their customers' coins is a much needed improvement in this aspect and the only correct way how to compare the importance of exchanges with the importance of other stakeholders.
Q: What about the developers, ambassadors, business people, marketing stars, ..? Don't they know better what needs to be done than random coin/hash holders?
A: Stake holders are expected to be able to delegate their voting power to anyone they trust the most.
Q: Doesn't that mean that devs will have to be wasting time playing the role of a politician?
A: They already do that now.
Q: Won't participation be too low? Small coin/hash holders don't want or can't spend their time on governance.
A: Delegation solves this. Important realization is that in the case of majority not voting (not caring, not paying attention) even relatively low percentage (say 20%) of coin holders can reach a decisive victory in a market war and therefore is a legitimate voting turnout.
Q: Is this Liquid/Delegative Democracy?
A: Except it is not a democracy in the sense of 1 person = 1 vote, but a shareholder voting.
Q: Reeee! Bitcoin is not a company!!! It is an open-source protocol! There can not be any share holder voting!!! It's not in the Satoshi's whitepaper!
A: That's not a question.
Q: What if someone wealthy (FED, CIA, ..) buys all the coins or hash and votes for something stupid.
A: That's not a new problem really. Remember i'm not proposing any change here. (All the companies with shareholder voting have in theory the same problem btw.) We are totally screwed in this case anyway, no matter what, Satoshi's invention would be proven to not work at all (all the cryptocurrencies die) and we need to go back to traditional central banking. https://www.bitcoin.com/bitcoin.pdf "If a greedy attacker is able to assemble more CPU power than all the honest nodes, he would have to choose between using it to defraud people by stealing back his payments, or using it to generate new coins. He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules, such rules that favour him with more new coins than everyone else combined, than to undermine the system and the validity of his own wealth." In other words, this is exactly the governance model Satoshi 'invented', and there hasn't been any other option invented yet.
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