I think a meritocracy in which you can buy yourself in is flawed. I know you plan on implementing a reputation scheme but i think this is flawed, too.
In bitcoin their are really 3 groups of political entities: users, miners and devs. I think this year has shown that it is a good thing to have this seperation between the devs and miners, just as we have a seperation of legislative (~devs) and executive (~miners) powers in constitutional states. If these two powers are in dispute their will be a hard fork and the problem is thus escalated to the users, which then take the role of the judges. The users (represented by wallet-providers and exchanges) than vote by choosing to running the software of a particular party of devs. So they put their trust in devs and not miners, just as we trust politicians which we elect and not the police.
With the initial scheme and even more so with the planned reputation scheme, you are giving too much power to those who gain profit by the system. This will on the long run lead to decisions that are bad for the users as these forces will try to maximize their profit.
Probably this problem can be fixed within the system before the corruption becomes to bad though. At some point there needs to be a decoupling of the decision making from the gaining of profits. One idea would be to have the voting chips as separate token with fixed supply that are not freely trade-able but need a majority vote (or a user activated hard fork) to be transfered.
This is a real difficult political discussion. I somehow doubt it will be that easy for people to change their minds on what system is right for the job. Both democracy and meritocracy have their pros and cons and they are both natural. When you have a group of people that need to make a decision, you naturally care about the ones that contributed the most, but again majority is the ones that are always in charge, so if they really donāt like it, they will just take it over themselves and make their own choice.
It is a difficult discussion, but we should of course have it.
For one UAHF are always possible in a decentralized system, including in Bisq. If users really donāt like how it is going, they can always fork their own Bisq. So we always naturally have democracy, as long as it is all open source and decentralized. But also we have meritocracy that works if the users donāt disagree and fork off, so it makes sense for the ones involved in the voting to not go against users too much and since they did contribute in the first place, then it isnāt that bad that they seek profit.
However, it is still more complicated then that, it always is. It is a possibility that DAO holders make a mistake and do something that isnāt in the users interest or therefor their interest, as it isnāt just about incentives when you look for vulnerabilities in a voting system, but also itās tolerance of mistakes, or as we would call it in programing, bugs. For the sake of stability, we should think about what could make someone take over the DAO or influence it in a way that no one wins. Whenever you have power, you have responsibility as well, so DAO holders need to be very careful and educated on how their actions influence the DAO.
There is no simple programming solution for it, we need a good community that will keep DAO holders informed and let them discuss. We canāt hope that it will be perfect, but we need to take it seriously and do our real best, it is an important thing that we could be doing here.
Thanks for your thoughtful posting. I agree that the separation of power in Bitcoin has some similarities in democratic systems, though I would not over-expand comparing fundamentally different systems. Also comparing a cryptocurrency with the Bisq DAO has some problems. There are some things in common but also much is different.
The main protection against stakeholders abusing the system for their profit is the fork risk. Open source is a powerful feature which is missing usually in traditional political systems. Transparency is another. There will be also overlap of users and stakeholders, as market makers will be part of the initial distribution and anyone can buy tokens to increase their stake.
But the final argument for me is that the power is not rooted in stake but in weighted stronger in reputation (reputation is derived from past work/contribution). I believe that those who work on that project have incentives which are not only driven by profit maximization (there are easier ways to get quick rich - ICOs for instance).
How it develops over time is an open question and the current design of the DAO is just the start which should make it good enough to grow to the next level. The DAO will be an ongoing effort for improvements and the political structures are subject for changes if flaws are discovered. Change is a clear feature here and nearly nothing is set in stone.
This thread has turned into an excellent conversation. Thanks, all!
On a more general note, now is a good time to mention that three days ago, we launched the testnet genesis distribution of BSQ that marks the beginning of phase zero of the Bisq DAO. I gave a talk this weekend at Hackerās Congress in Prague about Bisq, the DAO, and phase zero, which will serve as a kind of pre-release period for BSQ and the DAO. The slides can be found at How to Bootstrap a DAO - #HCPP17 - Google PrƤsentationen, and Iām told the video of my talk will be posted soon on the Paralelni Polis YouTube channel. Weāll tweet about it from the @bisq_network account when it goes up. Iāll publish a paper on phase zero within the next few days as well, and Iāll add a link here about it when I do.
Hereās a 10-minute interview I did with World Crypto Network at the event. It provides a pretty concise recap of my longer talk, so Iām sure folks will want to check it out.
A huge thanks to @ManfredKarrer and @grazcoin, who worked together the night before the talk to get the distribution transaction put together, and to get the BSQ explorer updated to point to the genesis block on testnet. It was fun to be able to announce in my talk that operation of the Bisq DAO has now commenced!
For the past contributors out there reading this, stay tuned. Weāll be in touch with you soon with information about which testnet BSQ addresses are yours, and how you can use them to vote in the first round of compensation requests at the end of this month (October).
UPDATE: added a link to the WCN interview, which I forgot the first time around.
I am pretty sure that they are not related for number of reasons. But I would never even assume they are just because they share the word Git in their name
Git is not a random word GitHub uses, it is a āversion control systemā.
You can read more about it here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git
The Git version control system is used for tracking changes to text files. Program code is one type of text file, so are Markdown files. So I wonder if Gitbooks just uses the Git system to track changes to text-based books. I didnāt mean they are the same company or founded by the same people.
GitBook version is 3.2.3
Here we go. I made a change to a test book on Gitbooks and this is part of the output from the Gitbook system. Perhaps they modified the Git system to do books in a more specialized way. Neat concept anyway.
Yes it has been a very interesting and important discussion - Bisq is the crypto development closest to my own personal philosophy and I dearly hope it continues to thrive and have an impact on the world - which is in a desperate state for many reasons . .
Many thanks to all involved particularly the founders!
No, you can choose to continue paying trading fees with plain bitcoin instead of BSQājust note that youāll pay more than you would pay by using BSQ, and that your fees wonāt help to sustain the project since they wonāt be routed to Bisq contributors.
Trading fees in btc goes directly to arbitrator as it was done previous to DAO?
Self-answer:
Note on BTC revenues
Currently, Bisq only collects trading fees in BTC, and these fees only go to arbitrators. There is no mechanism to distribute them to other contributors. The DAO solves this distribution problem with BSQ through the process outlined above. But since traders will also be able to pay fees with BTC when the DAO goes live, where will those BTC fees go then?
For a little while, they will continue going to arbitrators. But shortly after the DAO launches on mainnet, Bisq will implement a new trading protocol that removes arbitrators, and BTC fees will be sent to a ādonationā address determined by DAO voting. This BTC could then be used to buy BSQ on the market to distribute the fees to stakeholders, and the BSQ obtained will be burned.
Your self-answer sounds about right. I wanāt aware that they will go to the single donation address instead of arbitrators, but that can certainly happen. Either way, everything is up for a vote on the DAO.
There is.
Each month contributors fill a compensation request and are paid in BSQ.
(For 2019Q1, ~300.000 BSQ have been awarded to contributors).
And since the DAO launch, BSQ are tradeable (and trade well).
