Vote: Self-sustainable Decentralized Governance by Blockchain

[deusstultus]

If the block rewards go directly to a project owner, the project owner has the obligation to report their own income, correct? (Wouldn't this eliminate any tax implications from DASH? This is essentially mining.)

If the block rewards go to a fund and that fund pays a project owner then the fund owner may be required to report income and/or report income paid to the project owner, correct? (This would essentially, force a bunch of (current or future) tax paperwork on the fund owner we don't want.)

IANAL, but It's a unique case, which always draws question. The miner creates the transaction and could have legal merit, the masternode receives funds and further executes services based on a relatively unspecified contract. Sure if this goes directly to a fund it's relatively easy to prove no ownership of the funds, but it's a gray area without definition. Likely to ever arise as a concern? Probably not, but if it does...? This was by far the weakest of my points, but I felt it worth mention. Per usual, I'm encouraging discussion and not driving decision points.

 

[bhkien]

Problem 3: From a technical perspective it's very difficult to make a system to enforce these payments, especially in a decentralized way.

Solution:

Instead of paying multiple addresses directly from the blockchain, I propose we make a "masternode escrow account". This will be a new type of account, that will require a quorum of masternodes to make transactions from. For example, it might require 30 random signatures from random masternodes, to make a transaction to pay for a specific proposal.

This type of masternode account means the masternode network can hold it's own money. It has many uses for us and will be extremely useful in the future for many different applications, e.g. it would be necessary for our decentralized web wallet idea.

Does it means that we need another blockchain running on masternodes?

 

[Solarminer]

sorry but i do not see the connection between the Ripple fine and this fundraiser at all !

Edit:
And I do not think it is fair to throw this paranoia into the discussion !!!

This actually isn't off topic. It weird how the crypto world is so different than the fiat currency world. HSBC makes loads on laundering drug deals and gets a little fine. Charlie Shrem is sentenced to two years in prison for indirectly helping to send $1 million to Silk Road.

So the key to this article is, they should have had:

• Filed suspicious activity reports submitted for transactions over 10K (or certain subjective amounts under this).
  
• Obtained "know your customer" documentation
  
• Enforced an anti-money-laundering protection program

Why? They should have known they were a money services business as part of the bank secrecy act.

The question of the day is, "Is this proposal putting the escrow account into the category of a money services business and adding additional requirements? Now, or potentially in the future?

 

[deusstultus]

Does it means that we need another blockchain running on masternodes?

Voting plus multisig scripting would be the sensible basis here, sidechains should never be encouraged. However while script-based transactions are fairly well established, they have not been implemented at this scale and introduce risk should involved masternodes not follow convention.

 

[moli]

If the block rewards go directly to a project owner, the project owner has the obligation to report their own income, correct? (Wouldn't this eliminate any tax implications from DASH? This is essentially mining.)

If the block rewards go to a fund and that fund pays a project owner then the fund owner may be required to report income and/or report income paid to the project owner, correct? (This would essentially, force a bunch of (current or future) tax paperwork on the fund owner we don't want.)

I think the fund is like another PoS so we can say even though the coins are paid to the devs or whoever of the voted project, it's like they "mine" the coins, like MN owners "mine" their coins. If this is defined as such under the law, I'm guessing we don't have to worry about the govt going after us for handling money without being registered with FinCEN. The payees just have to pay their own taxes just like any other miners and investors if they have made a profit.

 

[eduffield]

So does this mean the plans to remove the reference node are being postponed or is it now a permanent fixture?

Also I doubt it's worth spending a lot of time worrying about governmental aspects influences until we are a lot larger and publicly visible. As I am certain most legislators or bureaucrats don't even know this projects exist let alone have any plan of action regarding it. Hell it will take years for them to begin to understand, just us like with any new tech.

The reference node will be removed in v12 for sure, none of the logic above requires it (except for the first phase in v11).

 

[Solarminer]

Problem 3: From a technical perspective it's very difficult to make a system to enforce these payments, especially in a decentralized way.

Solution:

Instead of paying multiple addresses directly from the blockchain, I propose we make a "masternode escrow account". This will be a new type of account, that will require a quorum of masternodes to make transactions from. For example, it might require 30 random signatures from random masternodes, to make a transaction to pay for a specific proposal.

This type of masternode account means the masternode network can hold it's own money. It has many uses for us and will be extremely useful in the future for many different applications, e.g. it would be necessary for our decentralized web wallet idea.

Does it means that we need another blockchain running on masternodes?

Sign me up. A second masternode network profiting from the 10% donations.

Seriously, I think Evan was referring to fluctuations with DASH vs US$. I don't see fluctuations with DASH to US$ a big deal here. If the price goes up or down the project owner will need to either absorb it or apply for further funding. In a few years, I bet DASH will be more stable than the US$ anyway. Another way to do this would be to let the project get paid for a few extra weeks(assuming recurring payments from the block rewards directly). That way the payments stay the same, just the time changes.

I also see that the project payment could just be pulled from the masternode block rewards with 1 out of every 60 masternode payments for each %. This wouldn't require changing the current split % between MN and Miners. It would be like adding an additional 25-250 masternodes.

 

[alex-ru]

The idea is great, I know it, but the solution is almost there: We do not want it to be palliative. We want it to be good long term.
Let's open our ears and listen to all opinions... and only then decide/vote

I am also not absolutely happy about this voting and think some things may be done better way, but...
1. There are so many opinions and contradictory ideas - we could keep debating them for months... So more constructive is - to start with something, get first practical results and then correct system, than doing endless theoretical discussions.
2. For every decision - there are some logical-technical limitations, and many of them only developers are competent to estimate...
3. I realize proposed model as "release candidate (similar to initial early_2014_darksend)" that will be changed in future...

My general opinion on vote: it has to include announce - the exact way (and time?) MN ops may correct the proposed "model" in 2015... It will allow MN ops to feel more confident and stop being afraid of making "fatal mistake" by voting "yes".

 

[tungfa]

My general opinion on vote: it has to include announce - the exact way (and time?) MN ops may correct the proposed "model" in 2015...

i see this totally being part of it
when suddenly all MN's keep voting 'nay' (and concerns are raised in the community)
no project will get approved and the Dev team will and has to listen to the community
and we will go into the next round of discussions and eventually changes of the original idea

 

[TaoOfSatoshi]

i see this totally being part of it
when suddenly all MN's keep voting 'nay' (and concerns are raised in the community)
no project will get approved and the Dev team will and has to listen to the community
and we will go into the next round of discussions and eventually changes of the original idea

Yes, this is also what I've been saying. Do it, evaluate it, and change it if need be.

 

[tungfa]

we have to start somewhere,
that is my believe in this.
we can discuss this for another 2 weeks, get a new version, another 2 weeks discussion,..... (dam that will be tiering)

lets start with this and see where it takes us,
i think evan changed a lot of points raised by the community and this is a good middle ground to get this started and see where it takes us.
(i can not wait to show this off when implemented to the BTC people, and others who go for lame outside funding :wink

 

[Sapereaude]

The reason for the paranoia is that there are so many people getting arrested in the Bitcoin space with what seems like insignificant activities. Bitcoin is getting more traceable and the record is permanent. So as time goes by more technologies are used to go back into the blockchain to chase transactions. DASH is similar except when Darksend is used. It isn't now that matters with DASH at $3 as much as in 10 or 20 years when it is $100 or $10,000. The blockchain transactions are permanent and public, which makes tracking back overtime an issue. The confiscation of funds will happen when the wallet hits $100K or $1,000K or something significant. All that needs to happen is for it to be considered an "unlicensed money transmitter business" or "failing to report suspicious activity".

The questions we need to ask with this comingled escrow fund(not just today, but 10 or 20 years from now):
Is this a money transmitter account? (How are projects going to be paid in $? Is a proxy used to convert DASH to $)
Are we paying taxes with the funds? Are we giving out W2s or 1099s and hiring contractors? Is the project owner required to report as income? (This is a lot clearer if DASH is sent to one person directly from the block rewards. When a comingled fund pays for labor, I think this all changes.)

Hosting a node offsite still is not that answer. Your IP that you access your server is recorded. Further action could be taken with a proxy server to hide your access, but you get the point. It isn't as easy as just changing providers. I agree that I can be paranoid, but this proposal will cause problems over time. We are trying to find a solution that will last, not something that exposes all the masternode owners.

I am not saying 1.25% is the right number. The chart above says 1.25% and the text says 2.5%. I just picked one. 2.5% would be about $72,575/year at $3/DASH, not insignificant by my standards. Maybe we put in 10% for 1 month.

The last issue is that this 10% has no end. Let's vote in each project with a specific donation and timeframe. There is no mechanism stated above to return the funds if there are no projects, so inevitably this will get wasted on bad projects or abused as time goes on. (I don't think this is the intent of this proposal, but a forced donation like this will not end well even with the best intentions.)

I would argue that these are irrelevant questions, DASH is not valued at billions of dollars with thousands of eyes looking at it. There are not multiple multi-million dollar companies looking exploiting the tech, not law enforcement seminars on DASH, no legislative bodies wondering how to legislate DASH and hell even dark markets don't use DASH yet.

The point is that this is a prototype program we have no idea what the landscape will look like in 5,10,20 years time or how this part of the DASH project will evolve. You are attaching snow chains to the car's tires before it even starts raining, wasting time and leaving it stuck in the driveway. There are relevant questions to be asked, but not these.

Perfection is the enemy of progress.

 

[Solarminer]

I would argue that these are irrelevant questions, DASH is not valued at billions of dollars with thousands of eyes looking at it. There are not multiple multi-million dollar companies looking exploiting the tech, not law enforcement seminars on DASH, no legislative bodies wondering how to legislate DASH and hell even dark markets don't use DASH yet.

The point is that this is a prototype program we have no idea what the landscape will look like in 5,10,20 years time or how this part of the DASH project will evolve. You are attaching snow chains to the car's tires before it even starts raining, leaving it stuck in the driveway. There are relevant questions to be asked, but not these.

Perfection is the enemy of progress.

I think we can all hope/believe that DASH will be worth much more in the future. If we play our cards right, it will be an easy road ahead when that day arrives. Just trying to help us all get there a little easier by putting in a little more effort now.

 

[darkchild]

Can some one explain to me why several people are so paranoid about goverments, in the sense that why in the current state of affairs would anyone care in the slightest about DASH? Maybe when we reach the 100+ million marketcap, until then I can not see any logic in worrying about governments or resonantly be able to predict the reaction, Even then if you are so petrified in your belief that this is a problem then there is a simple solution, host your node somewhere that don't require personal details. Hell if there is a problem you can always activate the node somewhere else. I feel this paranoia it has very little to do with the proposal and that your turning a feature of DASH(decentralized cold nodes) into a negative for no good reason.

Winners pre-empt. Losers react...
Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.

Sooner than later the U.S. government is either going to coming knocking or will require all cryptos including DASH to introduce key changes that will lead to total regulatory capture as we see from the article below. No one has all the answers, but so long as we have these open discussions, some members of the DASH community will no doubt step up and provide some insights and solutions to these legal/tax aspects.

I learned a long time ago to read up on government policies especially those that directly or indirectly affect my field of work, and this saved me a lot of headache down the line whereas those who didn't bother ended up making lawyers and tax consultants very rich. I may not agree with the government policies, but the government's still hold the big sticks. If DASH is going to change the crypto landscape and potentially the world of digital cash, then we have to recognize that DASH won't be operating in the fringes especially when widespread adoption kicks in. The foundations we lay down now will affect how the government perceives DASH and reacts accordingly.

Let's not be naive to think for a moment that the decisions we are making with these new DGB innovations and voting mechanisms won't send ripples and eventually financial shockwaves out into the world and affect governments that are largely controlled or influenced by the legacy financial cartels.

I also won't be surprised if Bitcoin and other cryptos start to follow the footsteps of DASH.

Article below:

-----------------

How could the government seek to force changes to an open-source software platform that’s supposed to be free from any party’s centralized control? Could it feasibly apply to other digital currencies – including bitcoin, whose governance structure has no go-to management actor like Ripple Labs? How will users react to the notion that Ripple is snooping on them even if the company is not itself a counterparty to their trades?

It also seems impossible that FinCEN could wield similar influence over the management or monitoring of bitcoin’s decentralized protocol — there is, after all, no core company leading the development and adoption of bitcoin’s technology in the way that Ripple Labs leads the ripple network. But that didn’t stop bitcoiners from worrying about whether the government might try.

Prominent bitcoin developer Peter Todd, for one, took to Twitter put this question to Gavin Andresen, who leads a team of five core developers charged with updating and maintaining bitcoin’s core code:

So @gavinandresen, thoughts on FinCEN forcing Ripple to change their core protocol to add AML? How do we protect Bitcoin from that pressure?

— Peter Todd (@petertoddbtc) May 6, 2015

And Jerry Brito, executive director of Washington-based think tank the Coin Center said, “It makes me nervous that FinCEN is asking protocol level changes from a company. Ripple is a special case and I hope that FinCEN understands that.”

Others, including New York Law School Professor Houman Shadab, made the case that FinCEN had proven that the comprehensive state-by-state regulation of bitcoin companies as money transmitters was redundant.

FinCEN’s fine of Ripple suggests that federal enforcement of AML laws is robust and that state-level regulation is unnecessary. #Bitcoin

— Houman Shadab (@HoumanShadab) May 6, 2015

One thing’s for sure, however, this action comes as as reminder that digital currencies are on enforcement agencies’ radars.

“Rock solid anti-money laundering compliance should be at the forefront of every digital currency company’s agenda,” said Perianne Boring, President of the Washington-based Digital Chamber of Commerce. (Michael Casey)​

http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2015...cen-bombshell-ripple-labs-addresses-concerns/

 

[qwizzie]

i think we need a command that we can run in the debug console which will show the following :

% voted for YES
% voted for NO
% voted for ABSTAIN (those will actually be the people that havent voted yet)

Lets for example call it ''masternode list results'', after the command has been given it will show the correct % that voted for YES, NO, ABSTAIN
so we as community know where we stand with regards to certain voting topics.

 

[Solarminer]

i think we need a command that we can run in the debug console which will show the following :

% voted for YES
% voted for NO
% voted for ABSTAIN (those will actually be the people that havent voted yet)

Lets for example call it ''masternode list results'', after the command has been given it will show the correct % that voted for YES, NO, ABSTAIN
so we as community know where we stand with regards to certain voting topics.

Good idea. For now try this.(linux only)
./dashd masternode list votes | grep -c YEA

And here are the latest results.
135 yes
11 no
2391 abstain

 

[darkchild]

Good idea. For now try this.(linux only)
./dashd masternode list votes | grep -c YEA

And here are the latest results.
135 yes
11 no
2391 abstain

What if more than 51% of mastenode owners ABSTAIN from the vote after the voting window closes presumably due to lack of being aware of the vote or maybe because they were too technically challenged to run a basic command line entry.
Is there a way to send out a network alert/broadcast to masternode operators only? This way they can click on the tooltip/alert message which takes them to a page on dashtalk or dash pay with full instructions about the project and the vote.

Lots of people have friends helping them out with their masternodes as they don't keep up with all the dashtalk discussions and updates as some of us do. They are investors in masternodes but terrified of the command line.

I'm worried that without such a broadcast system, we might initially get a lot of people ABSTAINing unintentionally and affect project funding.

It might also be worth having the voting mechanism as a dummy-proof GUI feature before the end of 2015. Click on the shiny green, red or grey buttons for Yea, Nay, Abstain and then a dialogue box/modal window pops up and asks you to enter your password to confirm.

Once you vote, you can then see the results in real-time rather than getting your hands dirty in the commandline with pipes and greps to parse out specific results.

 

[oaxaca]

Good idea. For now try this.(linux only)
./dashd masternode list votes | grep -c YEA

And here are the latest results.
135 yes
11 no
2391 abstain

For the next version, can we use yes and no like normal human beings?

 

[GreyGhost]

Any way to see the current vote count? I voted but no "feedback" from the console...

 

[drkhouse]

For the next version, can we use yes and no like normal human beings?

nay sounds like just yawn. If you are bored press nay!

More seriously, they both work .

Also, if some dum countries try to taxe crypto, crypto users should start to find another one? As their country is probably not gonna let you or your kids be free of a real currency.