EOS Alliance | Constitution Referendum Series | Summary | Week 9
Recap of the Alliance open calls from Week 9, as interpreted by Martin Breuer(EOS Nation, Regional Director)
Starting Week #10 of the EOS Alliance Constitution Referendum Series, I’d like to provide an overview of the discussions that took place in the previous week.
The main point on the agenda was analyzing the proposed EOS Constitution / Charter V03 by EOS Amsterdam, which in last weeks has been reviewed by many working groups and individuals.
Since it’s an open document there have been made multiple changes based on comments from the community. You can find the latest version HERE.
Actually, several groups started writing their V3 based on editing the EOS Amsterdam’s Charter.
The first call of Week #9 was the Korean English call.
The call pretty much was all held in Korean and here I want to say special thanks to Jun Sik Yoon for helping me translate some points of their conversation.
The group spent quite some time on choosing and checking carefully the proper meanings of used expressions in the articles to avoid misunderstandings.
During the call articles were merged and sentences were added or deleted.
The overall document is still in the works and to be finalized while I’m writing this, therefore I won’t get in those details as they might still change.
The group’s general questions, findings and suggestions were:
- It was suggested to lower the allowed maximum of owned tokens per user from 10% to 5 %. This rose some concerns considering how much EOS tokens Block One is already owning. Avoiding whales controlling the chain, however, seemed to be the greater cause.
- In order to track ownership and voting better, it was discussed whether or not the multi-account problem could be solved by an identity and reputation system?
- There was quite a bit discussion about the proxy voting system and whether or not it is a helpful feature of the current system. How proxies are rewarded and how are they allowed to reward token holders was another question.
- The group agreed that ECAF should be advising BPs, not controlling BPs.
- It was agreed that it’s not the constitution’s / charter’s responsibility to protect users that lost funds due to careless behavior I.e. by simply forgetting or losing private keys. Basic safety should be also a responsibility of the users.
The group ended the call after 2 hours and agreed to organize 2 more calls in the following days to finalize their draft.
The Chinese/English Call happened one day later and had a total of 11 participants.
Their findings, questions & suggestions were:
- A very obvious change in the Amsterdam proposal is already in the name of the document. While V1 & V2 both were named “Constitution”, EOS Amsterdam introduced the term “Charter”.
- The change was made by EOS Amsterdam because “Charter” seemed a more fitting term to an agreement of users and service providers, unlike “Constitution”, which is related more to a foundation of countries.
- In the Chinese translations of the current proposals the term “constitution” is translated into “convention”, simply to avoid any complications due to the political nature of the term “constitution”. Using the Chinese characters for “constitution” might trigger censorship bots on Chinese social media platforms.
- Out of respect to the Chinese community, the less political term “Charter” recently found many advocates in the western community.
- However, “Constitution” has been used for a long time in the global community. A potential change of terms should be properly explained to the wider community to avoid confusion.
- Which term is a better fit, should be further discussed and eventually decided by the international community.
To clarify here are the definitions of both terms:
CHARTER : It is a written grant by sovereign country or legislative power of country by which a body such as a company , university etc is created or its rights and privileges are being defined .
CONSTITUTION : A body of fundamental principles or established precedents by which a state or other organisations are to be governed .
- To end the topic “Constitution vs Charter” the group took a vote which showed more support for the term “Charter”.
- Recently discussed problems like “vote buying” are not really addressed in the V2 & V3 proposals. Shouldn’t these topics be explicitly addressed to show the constitution’s / charter’s intention to deal with such?
There’s a more detailed article I’d like to share here, which shows more of these concerns:
https://steemit.com/eos/@geos.one/where-is-the-way-of-eos-convention
- In Dan Larimer’s (BM) V2 the “Intent of Law” is very prominent. In the current V3 proposals this term is not addressed. Since Dan’s opinion is important to the community, shouldn’t V3 proposals include a section to address “Intend of Code”?
Overall the Chinese call had a joyful atmosphere and participants started cracking some jokes about the mystery of David’s mouth and the pixel appearance Wang Yun from SheOS, who did a great job translating during the call.
In the newly introduced FAQ section popped up the question of who will enforce the
constitution and how? BPs? This also should be defined clearer in any new proposal.
The last call of week #9 was the English Only Call, which had 7 participants.
It was joined by Jun, who also runs the Constitution Study Group you can find HERE.
He reported that they’ve been discussing options for Layer 2 Governance and introduced a project called Ulex, an open source Legal System. You can find more info HERE.
After a general introduction of the task, the group started focussing on Article 12 of the EOS Amsterdam Charter “Dispute Resolution”.
Their findings, questions & suggestions were:
- It seems that in Amsterdams Charter Block Producers (BPs) are in charge of appointing arbitration providers, wouldn’t that give BPs too much power? Would appointed arbitrators in that case still act independently?
- The document seems to be very specific but somehow still remains vague. An example was given regarding article 12.5.3. : “…charge fees that are reasonable taken into account the merits of the cases concerned.” Who decides what is reasonable here?
- Wouldn’t a clear, broader and minimalistic approach be more practical, inviting and representative. The specific details could be dealt with in sub-documents. Similar to how the RDR (Rules of dispute resolution) are now used in the current constitution.
- How could the RDR under the current circumstances be changed? How would amending of sub-documents work? Would that require a referendum?
- The order of different layers of documents was explained on the Canadian model, which separates law, regulation and policy. The law here is not very specific and expresses the pure intent. Specifications are then expressed first in the regulations and further in the policy, which give instructions on how the law should be executed.
- It is to be expected that many disputes will be solved by automated processes, human arbitrators would serve only as the last resort. This should be considered in the decisions around dispute resolution.
- Can referendum help already in the process of drafting a V3 Charter/Constitution, by giving a clear direction via simple “Yes or No” Polls? What kind of role can referendum play in the lawmaking process of the EOS Community? The recent article by EOS New York asking for a referendum on whether or not REX should be implemented was mentioned. It can be found here: https://medium.com/eos-new-york/rex-needs-a-referendum-why-thats-good-for-eos-e1e5519b47b2
- The V3 should address and introduce parameters like the inflation, Block Producer Pay, REX etc. clearly, since they are fundamentally important to how the system works. Those parameters need to be understood and evaluated before the referendum and having them mentioned in the constitution would be helpful to the process.
- The group then discussed the recent implementation of eosio.wrap (formerly eosio.sudo), which gave the Block Producers powers which they already had but formalized the process of using them. For further info on that check this article by the BP Libertyblock:https://steemit.com/eos/@blockliberty/eosio-wrap-eosio-sudo-demystified
This sums it up for week #9 from me. Unfortunately, I haven’t managed to get some points from the Russian calls, yet.
In week #10 there will be new proposals by the Korean and also the Russian working groups up for discussion and comparison. It needs to be decided whether or not it’s useful to try to merge them into a shared V3 proposal or to finalize them separate from each other and vote on multiple versions.
Looking back there has been made quite a bit of progress and a lot of work has been put in from different parts of the EOS Community.
Putting it all together now and working out the defining details before putting it up for a vote via referendum will be exciting and also challenging.
Nevertheless, looking forward to it.
See you on the calls.
