Bitcoin Unlimited Membership -- Join us

[AdrianX]

> so why joining process takes so much long time?

@eurovive and all new members

Being a BU member allows one to contribute and dictate the development of the BU implementation of the Bitcoin Protocol.

Considering bitcoin could be highly successful having influence on how the protocol is developed would give one unusual influence and power.

BU is deigned to limit that power and allow that power to be directed according to the Bitcoin Unlimited: Articles of Federation as dictated by the members. Unlike BS/Core who only considers contributions by programmers and give undue influence on protocol changes based on programmer seniority.

So if you truly believe bitcoin will be a success being a BU member will carry influence or responsibility comparable to being on the board of directors of a national Central Bank today.

If you ask me the process doesn't take a lone time considering whats at stake, there is no urgency.

To prove yourself you should take part in this discussion forum as well as others, Bitcoin's success and the success of BU is dependent on engaged members from diverse disciplines that have demonstrated a significant contribution or years of commitment to bitcoin.

 

[TrevinHofmann]

So if you truly believe bitcoin will be a success being a BU member will carry influence or responsibility comparable to being on the board of directors of a national Central Bank today.

Central banks set policies. BU enables users to set their own policies.

 

[AdrianX]

@TrevinHofmann yes exactly. BU members don't dictate bitcoin protocol changes unlike BS/Core developers and central bankers, hence I referenced the Articles of Federation to clarify. I believe BU members will cray much responsibility and influence if the BU implementation gains traction and membership shouldn't be considered lightly if BU is to avoid the centralized decision making fate of BS/Core.

 

[jake]

I'm looking for creative and critical thinkers to join the membership, but before I vote at the next members vote I'd value your input on the flowing:

• you've read and comprehend the Bitcoin Unlimited: Articles of Federation

• can give some critical feedback on
  1. one principal you mostly agree with and why
  2. one principal you think can be improved on and why

• and an appropriate screening question to ask new applicants to prevent introducing bad apples to the membership.

1. I agree strongly with the separation of powers, particularly in Article 3 § III. It's important that there are checks and balances to prevent any member of the BU organization from grabbing absolute control.

2. Not a principle, but I think the final paragraph of the document has been causing some confusion, particularly:

I further recognize that becoming a member of the Bitcoin Unlimited Federation and simultaneously working to undermine the Bitcoin Unlimited Vision will inflict substantial harm on the other members of the Bitcoin Unlimited Confederation, including but not limited to, loss of Member's time quantified by the average hourly wage of a principal engineer in the USA, loss of member monetary donations, and loss of opportunity.

This statement seems to have been construed by some as advocating for legal penalties for undermining the BU vision, but really it appears to be more along the lines of "you'd be wasting people's time, and you wouldn't want to do that, would you?"

Other improvements:

I noticed some typos. In Article 2 § IX:

A BUIP advocating for the removal of a particular officer may not be occur within 4 months of a prior unsuccessful proposal advocating for the removal of that officer.

Delete the word "be."

Article 2 § X:

If actions of the President, Secretary, Developer, Pool Operator, or Member is in violation of these rules, that is grounds for removal

Change to "are."

3. A screening question: Please describe some of the ways that you have been active in the Bitcoin community.

Edit: Some other miscellaneous thoughts:

4. I see that officers can be removed via a "No Confidence" BUIP, and anyone can be removed for violation of the rules. But what if an ordinary member becomes a "poisonous person," or what if someone's account becomes compromised? On one hand, membership in BU should not be a popularity contest, and having critics among the ranks serves a useful purpose. On the other hand, I can certainly foresee scenarios in which a member manages to become a poisonous person without explicitly breaking any of the rules of BU. I feel like there should be a way for ordinary members to be voted out as well. Is gaining a majority of voters to vote for member removal a significant enough hurdle to prevent it from devolving into "we don't like you, so you're off the island" scenario?

5. I see the emergence of groupthink as threatening to any organization. Ideally this will, in the future, no longer be a threat to Bitcoin as the process of protocol development becomes more decentralized, but still I would not like to see BU succumb to such failings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink#Prevention :

According to Janis, decision-making groups are not necessarily destined to groupthink. He devised ways of preventing groupthink:

1. Leaders should assign each member the role of "critical evaluator". This allows each member to freely air objections and doubts.
2. Leaders should not express an opinion when assigning a task to a group.
3. Leaders should absent themselves from many of the group meetings to avoid excessively influencing the outcome.
4. The organization should set up several independent groups, working on the same problem.
5. All effective alternatives should be examined.
6. Each member should discuss the group's ideas with trusted people outside of the group.
7. The group should invite outside experts into meetings. Group members should be allowed to discuss with and question the outside experts.
8. At least one group member should be assigned the role of Devil's advocate. This should be a different person for each meeting.

To that end, I especially like the ideas of inviting outside experts into meetings, and assigning the role of devil's advocate on certain BUIPs.

6. Users must provide a cryptographic signature when voting on a BUIP. However, forum accounts and Bitcoin private keys can be transferred. I doubt that it would be possible for an attacker to gain a majority of member accounts this way, especially not covertly, but this definitely opens up an attack vector in which someone who has not been voted in as a BU member is able to participate in BU voting. We should consider ways to guard against this.

 

[solex]

From the date of this post there are 14 days until the new member vote.

Here are some amazing people who wish to join Bitcoin Unlimited at what will be the 4th induction. Our organization gets progressively stronger after each membership vote and this occasion will be very significant.

For convenience I want to attach some background info to review for the benefit of the voting members, and put it in one place:

1. @jake
https://twitter.com/beijingbitcoins

2. @mike
https://twitter.com/memalley

3. @jonny1000
https://www.reddit.com/user/jonny1000

4. @Rogerver
https://twitter.com/rogerkver

5. @dgenr8
https://twitter.com/dgenr818

6. @Emil Oldenburg
https://twitter.com/emilolden

7. @Haiyang
https://twitter.com/ViaBTC

8. @eurovive
[please provide a link to some of your online history writing about Bitcoin]

9. @Helvetian616
https://www.reddit.com/user/Helvetian616

10. @adamstgbit
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=796276.40

All, any corrections or additional info is welcomed.

 

[adamstgbit]

i'd like to become a member so i can vote on a BUIP.

I've been around since forever, you might of read a few of my price predictions: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=796276.40

I've always been a big blocker, but when segwit was first proposed I for it ( mostly because i believed it would be rolled out alongside block increases ), after some discussion i began to dislike it, and as time went on and core failed to deliver, while making empty promises to miners about future block size increases, I came looking at what BU had to offer and found that I much prefer BU over core.

I have a relatively good high level view of how the bitcoin network works, and i'd like the opportunity to weigh in when it comes to voting for BUIPs. I'm particularly interested in voting on BUIP038 or BUIP041...

 

[solex]

Wow! Great to have your application @adamstgbit
Updating the post above now...

 

[tim potter]

@awemany @solex Sorry didn't see your reply.

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/5i5fn2/my_id_on_reddit_is_the_same_as_the_id_on_bitcoin/

 

[awemany]

@tim potter: No worries, thanks! Kind of interesting point actually: If we get a troll in here impersonating someone else, is there a way to exclude based on that? Probably not yet, but probably this isn't a problem yet, either.

 

[Peter R]

@solex: could we add Tim Potter to the membership vote? Tim also attended the Satoshi's Vision conference in San Francisco.

 

[solex]

@tim potter
You are already a member. I know that you do not visit the forum often, so must have missed the alert which would have ticked up from this.

Bitcoin Unlimited also welcomes four new members.

https://bitco.in/forum/threads/buip031-passed-new-members-for-election-2.1498/

Congratulations to @cliff, @Norway, @chriswilmer and @tim potter

We will be updating the membership list on our website. The default is assuming that members want anonymity. Anyone who is a member and is OK with being public on our website is asked to get in touch and we can add their real-name as this does give us a better image overall.

@Peter R
We do need to update our public list

 

[jsmith_dev]

I declare my interest in general membership. Please put it to a vote.

I am Julian Smith. Co-founder and CEO of Blockfreight™ the blockchain of global freight.

Commercially I have a keen interest in the long term stability of the protocol and feel that multiple clients on network are indicative of the natural progression and maturity of Bitcoin as a project.

For that reason, I want all projects building and contributing to the development of Bitcoin to evolve and deliver the best possible infrastructure for a peer-to-peer electronic cash.

All of the support and progress to date is on the back of this objective and it remains as relevant today as it did at the inception of this project.

On this basis, I would like to annex some personal time to witness and contribute feedback and at times code to this distribution. I am not making any exclusive commitments to one project or another as I have the most profound respect for nearly everybody in this space, even where our opinions diverge.

Thank you for the opportunity to step forward into this forum and I look forward to learning a lot and enjoying the time spent in communication and contact with like-minded and spirited cryptocurrency supporters in this space, and my other work in 2017 and beyond.

Edit:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jsmith_dev
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/jsmith_dev/
Medium: https://medium.com/@jsmith_dev

 

[solex]

@jsmith_dev Great to see your membership application!
Would you mind amending your post to include a link to some of your previous online history such as reddit, twitter or bitcointalk?

There should be another membership induction vote within 1-2 months.
In the meantime here is more information about BU, which you may have seen already...

https://www.bitcoinunlimited.info/articles
https://www.bitcoinunlimited.info/faq

 

[jsmith_dev]

No problem. Updated.

 

[Windowly]

I was one of initial members, but would like to re-apply for membership since my membership has lapsed over the last year. (Here is my original application for membership.) I still think Bitcoin Unlimited is the most elegant solution on the market and will eventually win (indeed it seems like it is already winning), because the ideas are pretty common sense.

I'm active on twitter (with the twitter handle OnWindowly) and on reddit (with the handle Windowly). The bitcoin address I'll use for signing is: 1LuP7s5RfwJftn4LkWw8RmtwH3h5VMKRfN

In response to AdrianX's response for input:

- I have read and comprehend the Bitcoin Unlimited: Articles of Federation. I was impressed with the thought that was put into the governance structure when I first joined a year ago but even more impressed now having seen how it has worked out the last year. The way Bitcoin Unlimited is designed allows for lots of new talent to be nurtured instead of stifled, and I really appreciate that.

-One of the things that I think could be improved is the rule on lapsed members. I still feel very much a part of Bitcoin Unlimited and advocate for it whenever I can, even though I haven't voted. I think probably a lot of members feel the same way, specially if it doesn't look like BU is going offtrack. I do really value the right to vote though, and that is why I'm applying again.

-A good question for new applicants would be to ask why (or why not) they think bitcoin unlimited is a better implementation/developer community than others.

Hy8yPwivO7WWRx0p/ntMid1qshi73UIV75cTGupNidn6IVQbJiIaRTYEFBnoPFBgA7dEIrnVAK7z7NSSXX13hb4=

 

[Wildfire.ca]

I have been in the space for a while and I run a BU node. I am active on Reddit, Stemmit, Google+ and used to frequent BCT, but I have not logged in for about a year now. What else do you need to know.

 

[tkg]

Hi All,

Coming to apply by way of Epicenter Bitcoin - shout outs to a great podcast! Heard theZerg and Andrew Clifford discussing membership and feel inspired to contribute.

I've been lurking forums, hodl'ing and experimenting with bitcoin since 2014, while studying community organization and development.

The similarities between obtaining consensus in the bitcoin community vs community development are striking and I've been fascinated following the narratives of core and other implementations.

All the while, I've been wondering how to contribute to the community, so figured this group is a good place to start.

I obtained a BS in CIS in 2003 and have been a sysadmin since 2000.

I'm interested in helping developers work through the politics of communal consensus and creating a platform of intelligent debate amongst all implementations which seems to match the values and philosophy of BU. I believe more in finding the right question more than the right answer.

Feel free to message me on twitter or reddit!

www.twitter.com/thekevgibson
www.reddit.com/r/c3vin

Edit: personal details

 

[kyuupichan]

I would like to become a BU member.

I have been involved with bitcoin since 2011, run a BU node, contributed to Electrum, wrote the ElectrumX Electrum server from scratch (https://github.com/kyuupichan/electrumx), run an ElectrumX server, and helped SickPig out with the BU great firewall testing last year. I am active in Tokyo; Digitsu and Roger Ver are personal friends.

Thank you.

 

[solex]

@Windowly, @Wildfire.ca, @tkg, @kyuupichan
Great to see your messages here! We have new members BUIPs every couple of months, so I will include you in the next one and advise beforehand when the vote will take place.

 

[Diestor]

Sign me up!

Im very interesstet in BU! please count me in!