BitShares Forum

Main => General Discussion => Topic started by: Brent.Allsop on January 07, 2015, 11:30:47 pm

Title: Adding ability to vote your bitshares for 3rd party surveys and petitions?
Post by: Brent.Allsop on January 07, 2015, 11:30:47 pm
There is a great way for people to vote for delegates on the Bitshare block chain, including the ability to delegate their vote to others.  It seems to me that we need some way to expand this so people can vote (and delegate their vote) to arbitrary 3rd party survey / petition systems.

In other words, instead of voting your shares for a particular delegate you would vote your shares for a 3 number identifier.  The first number would identify a 3rd party, such as Canonizer.com, survey monkey, or whatever.  The second number would identify a particular survey/partition, or whatever on that sight, the 3rd number would vote for a particular position/camp/answer or whatever.

Given that, people could do things like sign their shares to support petitions to accomplish things, vote for things, you could use systems like Canonizer.com to build and measure consensus or share support for a particular change in the system, or whatever.

Title: Re: Adding ability to vote your bitshares for 3rd party surveys and petitions?
Post by: vikram on January 07, 2015, 11:35:13 pm
I believe that's what's discussed here:
Title: Re: Adding ability to vote your bitshares for 3rd party surveys and petitions?
Post by: Brent.Allsop on January 08, 2015, 05:12:21 am
Right, I was very involved in that thread, and working on proposals to do just what Toast was describing with Canonizer.com.

Perhaps I misunderstood what Toast was talking about at the time.  I was assuming Toast was describing that people would register wallet addresses with a third party voting system (like canonizer.com) and the 3rd party system would then use the block chain to determine how many shares that user’s address had at any particular time to determine how much their vote was worth.

However Bytemaster pointed out that that wouldn't work, as it would reveal who owned what shares, and what public key wallets.  Some of us were just figuring that would be the cost of voting your shares.

So, it seems to me, if we want to do any kind of voting of shares, we need to do it on the block chain, similar to the way people vote for delegates.  And it would be nice if it could be generic, so any survey, petition, consensus building system could use it for people to anonymously vote their shares, to build consensus around proposed changes to the system, and so on, on any third party system.

Title: Re: Adding ability to vote your bitshares for 3rd party surveys and petitions?
Post by: arhag on January 08, 2015, 05:23:39 am
However Bytemaster pointed out that that wouldn't work, as it would reveal who owned what shares, and what public key wallets.  Some of us were just figuring that would be the cost of voting your shares.

Eh, we already have so little privacy because of delegate voting. If someone sends you any amount of BTS, it isn't too hard to figure out how much BTS they own by analyzing the blockchain. If they register an account on the blockchain and pay for the fee using their BTS stake, you can also fairly reliably figure out how much BTS stake they own even if they never send you anything.

I don't think the privacy argument should stop us from building this system. In the future, fancy cryptography could be added to help with privacy by dissociating the stake controlled by the (pseudonymous or real identity) BTS accounts from the pseudonymous voting accounts that actually vote for the various camps, ballots, and polls.