Coin-Weighted Voting

[CubicEarth]

There are only two things in Bitcoin than can't be Sybiled. One is PoW and the other is Proof of Stake. Using PoS for mining is still an area of active research and it may never be possible or desirable to fully implement.

However, using some type of proof of coins to cast votes related to the users preferences about the direction of the protocol is trivial to implement and make secure.

I'm curious how people here feel about the idea.

Perhaps there could be a BUIP that specified a process for voting... There could be regular votes every 6 months, and 'special elections' for urgent matters. To get something 'on the ballot' would require either some small amount of hash-power signalling or some non-reusable coin metric, like bitcoin-days-destroyed.

As for an actual voting protocol, perhaps the private key of the last used address of some coins could be used to sign for a vote. That would allow for voting and coins to be remain in cold storage.

Governance in Bitcoin is sorely lacking right now and I think this is an area where we can show leadership.

 

[torusJKL]

Do you mean something like this:
https://vote.bitcoin.com/

 

[CubicEarth]

Something like that, yeah. Voting is very much a matter of perception though, any vote needs to be perceived as legitimate. The tech is here, as that website demonstrates, but if a dev team / client gets behind it and puts the spotlight on voting, possibly by integrating it into the client, writing a formal spec or putting proposals out for a vote, it could give the voting legitimacy and have a snowballing effect.

 

[Windowly]

One way Dash does it is have a two-tiered approach where masternodes don't mine but vote -- and have to hold at least 1000 Dash.

 

[alkan]

There are only two things in Bitcoin than can't be Sybiled. One is PoW and the other is Proof of Stake. Using PoS for mining is still an area of active research and it may never be possible or desirable to fully implement.

I'm currently working on an alternative model to offer Sybil protection for blockchains. It doesn't have a name yet, but I might call it Proof of Membership or Proof of Account. It's a dual-token model that encourages economic decentralization (one-entity-one-vote instead of power in proportion to money/resources) and provides resistance against history attacks without relying on weak subjectivity:
https://hackernoon.com/decentralized-objective-consensus-without-proof-of-work-a983a0489f0a#.lvlkkb1gw

The model is a work in progress and might be used for voting as well.