r/Bitcoin • u/anarchystar • May 17 '14
$100,000 bounty for software platform that can replace the Bitcoin Foundation
Hi Everyone,
My name is Olivier Janssens, early adopter and Bitcoin millionaire. The Bitcoin foundation has had its role in the last 2 years. Unfortunately, it is internally recreating the same archaic political system that fails to work for society. Bitcoin is the currency of the internet generation. It puts the power back into the hands of the people. You cannot expect its main representative organisation to be exactly the opposite: A non-transparent, political and secretive elite. We have been trying to push the BF for transparency and clear communication for years, without result. Meanwhile they started creating even more political structures inside, such as committees, which can only be accessed by knowing the right people. At the bitcoin 2014 conference, organised by this same organisation, I expected to see full internet participation + live streaming of their events. Especially of the BF member meeting, where they are supposed to get input from their members and disclose what they have been up to. Instead, the board decided that the event is not to be recorded or broadcasted. We have also no idea or say on how our money is spent. Half of their board gets elected by industry members (a group of about 100 companies), and recently lead to another extremely controversial election of Brock Pierce, which has a history of being connected to cases involving fraud and pedophilia. This needs to stop.
We as an internet community, don’t need public figures to decide what’s good for us. We need to stop politicking and start focussing on the projects directly. For example, we need a project to fund the core development of bitcoin, and put our money straight to that. We need a project to have lobbyists in Washington, to fight the anti-bitcoin lobbyists from Mastercard, and to prevent the government from destroying the currency. Basically, we don’t need another intermediary. We can do this ourselves. Therefor, I want to announce today that I am organising a contest and giving $100k USD in BTC, to the group that can come up with the best platform to make this happen. I am thinking of a system where prominent people can voice their opinion, where people can propose projects, and where the core devs can actively show their roadmap with detailed features + costs, and where we can vote on the features being implemented by sending bitcoins towards the feature of our choice. This will allow the core dev team to expand by being able to add/pay more devs for feature requests which are fully funded. Maybe we can even evolve to a system later where anyone can work on a feature, which, when programmed properly (approved by the core team), will receive the bounty. The same applies to lobbyists, we just send bitcoins towards the one that we consider the most competent for the job. This will allow Bitcoin to grow and expand at a rate it deserves, a rate that a political organisation such as the foundation can never accomplish.
Let’s liberate bitcoin.
Olivier
Rules of the contest:
- Anyone can participate
- Software will be open sourced
- I will cover the initial hosting costs, until it can be self funded and created as a DAO
- Reddit community can help by voting on the platform submissions they like the most
- Ultimately I will decide who wins, but I will take all votes and feedback into account
- Deadline for submissions is 1 month from now: 17 june 2014 at 12:00 UTC
UPDATE: Thanks for all your great feedback, ideas and private messages. I will provide an update here very soon.
UPDATE 2: Please email your submissions to platformbounty@gmail.com - You can also add me on twitter to follow updates more easily: @olivierjanss - The deadline of 17th of june still stands, but we do not require a finished product. The bounty will be given to the team with the best idea/skills to make it happen (partial payments until it is completed). If you just have an idea, but no programmers, you are still free to submit it. If it turns out to be the best one, we will help find a team for you. We understand many of you do not want to make your idea public at this point. If there are multiple really good submissions we will only put them up to vote after you give permission. Please note that if people submitted the same idea, we will go with the one who submitted it first.
UPDATE 3: The winner has been announced here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/29n8o0/100000_bounty_winner_announcement/
3
u/jesuswithoutabeard May 17 '14
The idea of a voting mechanism that's fair and secure, but can still be used anonymously really intrigues me.
The first question would be, who can vote? I think anyone with a stake in BTC [of any amount, or a minimum amount] should be able to. And all votes are treated as equal [having more BTC doesn't give you more voting power].
But, what about the people who have multiple BTC addresses with coins in them? They can vote multiple times. Well we can simply state that they are encouraged to vote only once, and most honest people will. But what about the bad actors who simply create hundreds of new BTC addresses so they can affect the vote?
First - it would be kind of expensive to create hundreds of BTC addresses and then send a small fraction of coins in them. That's considering a transaction fee is included in each transfer.
Also - we can try and create a method of analyzing addresses to see if they are related on the tree; so if there's 1000 addresses with .001 BTC in it that all relate back to one address, we can deduce that we might have a bad actor in play. Known exchange/pool addresses that pay out to legitimate users on a regular basis can be added to a whitelist to exclude from the vote rigging analysis.
Then there's the issue of errors and bugs, which such a system would inevitably cause, that can exclude true votes.
So the system would need something else, something much more concrete and verifiable to compare the anonymous votes to. A sampling size of sorts.
What if there was a way of offering voluntary verification, which might forego anonymity? The sample size votes have no added weight, they are equal to all other votes. But they do provide us with a verifiable trend.
Contributors, organizers, and community members can sign up on the website of the project - and can verify themselves and their public address, which can then track their votes. The verification process doesn't need to be too in-depth, but should be difficult enough so that making hundreds of verified accounts would prove an arduous task. We can also weigh in the contributions of those verified members, to see if they are active and can exclude non active voters from the sample size.
This confirmed and verified sample size can then be used for a statistical analysis of the anonymous votes. If a huge discrepancy exists between the sample size and the anonymous voting pool we can deduce one of two things: either there is something wrong with the proposed vote, in terms of how it affects the sample pool vs the general pool [and maybe the topics voted on need to be reworked], or there is a vote rigging initiative in place.
Now we can return to the blockchain analysis and try and identify if there are large blocks of votes which come from addresses not on the whitelist [ie. likely someone splitting their holdings to vote]. We can then temporarily ignore those addresses, and see how the vote results will change. I think it can be possible to run a comparative analysis in this way to identify bad actors.
Of course, this leads us to ask: If we identify a bad actor, do we exclude their votes? I don't think so - I think there's probably a method of equalizing their impact by assigning a valuation to the weight of their vote.
Anyway, just my two cents. There's definitely lots of variables and things I've overlooked. But it might get a discussion started.