Hi Ryan, thanks for taking time to share more details about the proposed Blockstack token. I have some questions and comments about this post, replies in-line below:
And right now, there is no way for us to measure who is running what Blockstack node, so this is not actually a reliable way for us to uniquely identify stakeholders. Further, social consensus on forums tends to be unreliable and can be easily gamed. What we need is a mechanism that is much more robust than this and one that can reliably signal when and where the majority is on any given issue. And then as a more advanced setup, we need something that can help us drive protocol changes.
You could do this today by having users put a string in their zone file that says what version of Blockstack they support. The more expensive the user’s ID, the more heavily the vote is weighted.
The way to attain a state of decentralized governance is to properly define the stakeholders… And the right way to properly secure a decentralized consensus system is to establish a sufficiently large cost of attack.
I have shown above how this can be done by inserting one’s preference into the zone file of their blockchain ID. One could imagine other ways to do this as well, such as by signing a message with the public key associated with a blockchain ID and submitting the message to an external voting system which can then weight the votes according to the cost of the blockchain ID. You guys have built a sybil-proof ID system - get creative with it!
The way for decentralized systems to compete with centralized ones is to have sufficient incentives to contribute to the network.
Your assertion that “the way for decentralized systems to compete with centralized ones is to have sufficient incentives to contribute to the network” is a non-sequiter wrt the necessity of a token. Linux and BitTorrent are hugely successful compared to centralized/ proprietary alternatives and they did not need a token to attain this success.
The only reason bitcoin needed a new token is because Proof of Work, an inherent and integral part of the system, requires an expenditure of resources for its maintenance. Blockstack has no such inherent requirement that cannot be satisfied with bitcoin itself, and so does not have a need for a new token.
the way to properly resource the decentralized system is to create a protocol that provides economic incentives to those that maintain the system and contribute resources to it… Unfortunately without a mining system, there’s no way to tell which fork has the majority support.
Your co-mingling of the “incentive” and “governance” properties of the token makes the value of each less clear to me. What are people be incentivized to do, exactly? Why can’t these incentives be paid for with bitcoin?
With a mining system, however, there’s a mining reward that is given in each and every block to people who are putting large amounts of money on the line and sacrificing it to convert it into Blockstack tokens. That means that in order to take over the system, one would need to sacrifice a majority of the Bitcoin being sacrificed over a given time period. This gets harder and harder as the price of the token goes up.
It is not clear how exactly this “mining” system works. Are people burning bitcoins? Are machines performing proof of work? What exactly is happening here to produce and distribute tokens?
I read the Part 2 post as well to make sure my questions and comments here weren’t already addressed. I will comment on Part 2 separately on the other thread.
In short, after reading this post I do not believe a new Blockstack token solves any problems that cannot either be solved with the existing Blockstack system or by bitcoin (or whatever underlying native token) itself.