Briefly on Governance

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4 years ago (Last updated: 1 year ago)

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:

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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3 years ago

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.

This is an important point, I think. It's not easy to find things that can't be faked, especially anonymously.

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.

This is also a good thing to bring up. Stake holders could delegate their voting power to those whom they trust, and that'd be their prerogative.

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.

What does "delegation" mean in this context?

$ 0.10
4 years ago

delegation means - "by default (if i didnt cast my vote in a particular voting) this [address] can cast a vote with my shares."

For instance if i trust Roger mostly, i delegate my coins/hash to him. But then there is a voting about logo color where his opinion differs from mine (he votes green, but i like orange). I should then be able to cast my orange vote, without cancelling (and then reenabling) the delegation.

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4 years ago

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4 years ago

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4 years ago

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4 years ago

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4 years ago

In short, your writing about governance has been very good.

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4 years ago

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4 years ago

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4 years ago

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4 years ago

What are the coefficients for coin holders and hash holders?

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4 years ago

usually in multi chamber parliaments, all the chambers need to agree for a change to be implemented

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4 years ago

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4 years ago

Good point. I rather saw the equation as different ways to access a single parliament. Some earned their seat by work, other simply bought their way in.

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4 years ago

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4 years ago

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4 years ago

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4 years ago

Yes. Never been more obvious we need this.

I would argue exchanges shouldnt get to vote. As it is other people's money, but don't actually have "economic" control of that value.

I'm sure the actual exchange owners are wealthy enough to already have a large waited vote.

$ 0.10
4 years ago
  1. onchain that might be impossible to prevent, however it is possible to prevent by an offchain agreement. For instance after the steemit/hive voting fiasco, exchanges decided it's better for them not to vote on such political issues. This is probably going to be true for big exchanges that want to seem impartial. This is good, because their incentives might not be so aligned with the BCH anyways.
  2. smaller BCH friendly exchanges like coinex will probably vote. This is good, because their incentives are probably aligned with the BCH. And this would be happening with the (possibly even explicit) agreement of the people having their coins there. (storing your coins at a 3rd party is a form of delegation of trust after all)
  3. exchanges/banks might provide a delegation service for their customers (similarly as they provide staking services already) where you get to pick if the exchange should be able to vote with your coins or whom you want to delegate to.
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4 years ago

I think government will eventually regulate cryptocurrency in the future.

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4 years ago