Right now, I think there are two major threats to BTSX. The first is false names which phish for votes. I3 already has plans to address this in ways which seem adequate. The larger threat, however, is profiteering. Once BTSX leaks out of our little community, people are going to start voting, not for delegates which are reliable or which hope to improve BTS/the BTS community, but rather, for delegates who give them a portion of their pay in exchange for votes. Essentially, we run the risk of turning BTSX into just a Rube Goldberg franken-cryptocurrency, rather than a cryptoequity platform. I fear that, if this is not addressed, this will destroy BTS. Especially with slate delegation on the way. I can just see the profiteering easy lists now.
Now, there is no way, as I understand, to tell who has voted for who directly through the client. However, an inspection of the blockchain which reveals this information would be trivial. I have two suggestions as to how to solve this problem, though I'm not sure if either of these could even work.
The first is to build mixing directly into the blockchain for votes only. If this is possible, it would make an effective inspection of the blockchain theoretically challenging and practically impossible. The second solution is to look at however the hell darkcoin works, and apply their anonymous transaction algorithm to BTSX voting.
By making voting anonymous, we kind of have the best of both worlds. People can still engage in 1 on 1 exchanges (e.g., vote for me and then post in this thread and I'll give you 300 dogecoin) which would encourage new delegates, encourage participating in the community, make more people aware of BTS, and increase the total number of cryptotransactions. However, it would be very difficult to do this on an industrial, impersonal scale and essentially operate a delegate as if it were a mining pool.
To me, this seems like a much more devastating issue than fake names. While the latter is harmful, it wont destroy BTSX and the vast majority of users agree that its bad. However, the former really could break BTSX, and once people have started to use BTSX in this way, it will become difficult to convince them to go along with a fork that removes their ability to profit. This is a ticking time bomb.
Topic: Preventing Destructive Profiteering (Read 1283 times)
