Amendmends to the Articles of Federation

[Aquent]

I am opening this thread to invite suggestions and discussion of amendments to the Articles of Federation. The first amendment that I think we need, and wanted to see whether you all agree is to this clause:

"A BUIP is adopted if accepted by a majority of voters (51%) with at least 50% of members voting, unless otherwise indicated in this document (BUIPs that change these articles or remove officers)."

Expecting 50% of members to vote in a BUIP is highly unrealistic in my opinion as many members may go dormant, or are unaware of the BUIP, busy, etc. I suggest a much lower threshold where the simple majority of 51% in favour is maintained, but the quorum is reduced to a minimum of three votes.

I am not sure if you guys think 3 is too low, but some BUIPs may attract no interest even though they should pass, in which case the president, secretary and dev can vote if so they wish and pass it.

Please let me know what you think and feel free to make any other suggestions for amendments as well as show your agreement or disagreement with the suggestions.

 

[theZerg]

Guys, as my last move as benevolent dictator I made a few changes to the Articles . One change I made is that a BUIP can pass with only 25% of people voting if a super-majority (75%) votes "yes".

Check Github for the changes; I didn't push this to the web because I really wanted to do so with the new web changes but node.js did not work at all on my test machine so I could not test them.

The idea of secretary, pres and developer being able to unaminiously override a < 25% vote is a pretty good one too... unfortunate that I didn't think of that.

 

[solex]

Your changes are very helpful, and I think we will be fine in the short-term. As discussion here develops then I will raise a formal BUIP to formalize the small articles changes. Ideally this should be a very rare process going forward.

 

[Lee Adams]

I think the main issue with the Articles as written is that no-one is actually a member.

No one has (2.II) been invited by BUIP or signed off on the articles. On the other hand we shouldn't be open to Sybil attacks, as the current member thread is now.

 

[TrevinHofmann]

How would we prevent Sybil attacks? Seems like a big weakness in the whole system.

 

[solex]

Bitcoin Unlimited was founded before the announcement of Classic, when XT was a stalled project, and all Bitcoiners were looking at a Core-future: high main-chain fees, 0-conf weakened, a complex enhancement (SW) making old nodes become lightweight clients, and a focus for scaling usage towards 3rd-party off-chain products, all when blocks are reaching a loading point that Jeff Garzik summarized as an "economic change event".

BU launched into a climate of adversity. theZerg had executive powers and all membership requests prior to the election of officers are deemed accepted. This is fine because most have a long-standing presence on Bitcoin fora. They are known and some were instrumental to the ideas behind BU and an emergent block limit.

Today the priority is to release a patch-set on the new Core v0.12 which builds upon BU's first step of creating a client which allows emergent consensus to make the block limit a less important artifact of the transport layer. Publicity of settings via user agent and mined blocks advances this, dealing with the opt-in RBF situation, thin-blocks for efficient block propagation and preventing nuisance usage of the alert system, are all features that should be welcomed by many full node owners. (Assuming the BUIPs are passed).

Classic is launching soon, and this is a mining-focused initiative, so having an advanced BU client ready to attract non-mining node owners is a major goal, especially if Core digs in its heels until it fades into irrelevance

With respect to duplicate member accounts, 2.II mentions restricting the power of anonymous accounts. Maybe voting members will all need to disclose their public identity. The idea of allowing anonymous members a proof-of-stake, perhaps signing with a key for a balance they own e.g. >1 millionth of total bitcoins might be a sufficient bar against sybils, as an alternative for those who want privacy. That is a debate down the road.

 

[Lee Adams]

all membership requests prior to the election of officers are deemed accepted.

I think that is wise. What we need is some clarification of the members after the election.

My suggestion (to prevent Sybils and stop officials having too much power to control the membership) would be:

New membership applicants must provide a key and must sign this document with it (and post it in the current forum). The member is also encouraged to provide evidence to support their membership (prior forum history, WOT, etc.)
Once posted, the elected officials will decide whether to accept the member (based solely upon whether the officials think the membership is unique to a genuine individual).
If the new membership is rejected and the applicant objects to the ruling, then the president must submit a BUIP to accept the membership applicant. If passed the membership applicant becomes a member.
The results of this BUIP cannot be overruled by officials.

Officials can delegate the membership vetting function to an appointed membership committee.

As far as quorum is concerned, @Aquent is right. Currently it is unlikely to get met (e.g. the election of the president only just made quorum (about 55% turnout).

My suggestion here is to keep the quorum at 50%, but shorten membership terms as follows:

Instead of

Member: an individual who is invited (by BUIP) to join the Confederation, signs this document, and has (joined or) voted within the last 1 year.​

it becomes:

Member: an individual whose membership has been accepted before 15 Jan 2015 or in the method explained above, signs this document, and has voted (or actively abstained) for at least 1 of the previous 5 BUIPs OR have a membership started after the date of the 5th previous BUIP OR is an elected Official.​

BUIPS would then be resubmitted every 2 weeks, until quorum is met
I think this is a more democratic way of dealing with the quorum issue. Officials should never have any sort of way of overriding the membership.
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2.II mentions restricting the power of anonymous accounts.

By the time a BUIP is required to stop Sybil attacks, it is already too late.

 

[Roy Badami]

I'd like to bring up the issue of the moderation clause. If someone doxxed someone, are we *really* saying that the only action of the mods would be to move the post to the doxxing thread?