Removing The Interim EOS Constitution From The Code
And A Path Forward…
It’s been nearly a year since the EOS platform began the experiment of having more formal human governance on the blockchain. It wasn’t long after its launch did most EOS users realize the incredible difficulties of having a human layer of arbitration at the base layer of the blockchain, regardless of if the purpose was to prevent theft, handle disputes between BPs, or handle business disputes. Furthermore, it was also evident to most users pretty quickly that most of the current Constitution was unenforceable or irrelevant to the day-to-day operations of the network.
Moving Forward
So how do we move forward? The first step is to clear the confusion about the validity of the current constitution. There is very little support for the interim Constitution document in the first place, but it would be in good form to remove it from the code. It would clear up any potential confusion to new members to EOS and make the code more consistent with the defacto governance we currently have. It will also put an end to ECAF and eliminate the false hope that exists from those who may have lost EOS or are currently in a dispute.
Some EOS members might desire an immediate replacement Constitution or User Agreement first. There are at least two currently proposed, but we believe it is better not to rush and create a better process moving forward. Perhaps one can argue that we may not really need a Constitution at all.
We at EOS San Francisco plan to propose a simple referendum to remove the current Constitution from the code. We’d like to gather interest, feedback and support on this action so please let us know what you think.
Better Referendum Process
One of the observations about the referendum proposals so far in the two months it’s been implemented is that there has been very little active participation. Much of that may be because users are more comfortable with de facto governance. However if 15/21 block producers can dictate what happens in the network isn’t that too much power for the BPs? How can token holders be more proactive rather than reactive in shaping the ecosystem? Instead of token holders having to vote out misbehaving or misaligned BPs, perhaps we can foster a culture of being proactive and voting for referendum proposals to be signals of support and to keep BPs accountable. Some of the procedural questions that need to be answered include: What is the threshold of support that should be required to signify general token holder support for a proposal? By what approval margin and what minimum number of votes? How long should the referendums be proposed? Perhaps each BP would communicate and publish their own criteria up front. However giving the token holders ample opportunity to proactively support or object to proposals is important. This process is similar to negative notice procedures in courts where one can file a motion for an action and unless someone objects, that motion will pass. Hence voters would have to make sure they are active and voice their opinion for proposals they don’t support rather than strategically abstaining. As another analogy in parliamentary procedure you can request unanimous consent of a group to move forward with an action unless someone objects. The burden shifts to the objectors and organizations could move more quickly to implement popular proposals without being bogged down with formalities or by apathetic members. As far as specific suggestions rather than requiring a fixed percentage or number of votes for a quorum, perhaps the top 5 most actively voted proposals that receive 80% majority support over a 30 day period is a good enough signal of support. Each BP can have different criteria, but it’s important for them to communicate the criteria to those who vote for them and also get feedback from their supporters. For any change to be implemented, a referendum would eventually have to satisfy the criteria of 15 BPs with various criteria. A hypothetical example can be:
BP1 — Top 5 most active proposals, 90%+ support, 60 days
BP2–20 million votes minimum, 80%+ support, 45 days
BP3-Top 10 most active proposals, 75%+ support, 30 days
BP4-Top 5 most active proposals, 80%+ support, 30 days
BP5-Top 3 most active proposals, 55%+ support, 15 days
etc… Only until a referendum satisfies all the various BP criteria would there be sufficient support for a multi-sig BP implementation.
None of these criteria needs to be codified or stated in the Constitution. It can just eventually become customary for each BP to declare their own criteria. So what would your criteria be? Let us know your thoughts and let us move forth with more practical & effective blockchain governance on EOS!
-Jun Dam & EOS San Francisco
Appendix — Commentary on the Interim Constitution
The philosophical foundation and design principles of the current constitution stem from Dan Larimer’s series of posts here:
Why Every Blockchain Needs A Constitution
https://steemit.com/blockchain/@dan/why-every-blockchain-needs-a-constitution
How to create a meaningful Blockchain Constitution
https://steemit.com/eos/@dantheman/how-to-create-a-meaningful-blockchain-constitution
What could a blockchain Constitution look like?
https://steemit.com/eos/@dantheman/what-could-a-blockchain-constitution-look-like
Let’s have a quick review of the current Constitution. https://github.com/EOS-Mainnet/governance/blob/master/eosio.system/eosio.system-clause-constitution-rc.md
Here is a quick commentary about each article:
Articles 1) No Initiation of Violence, 2) No Perjury, 3) Rights, 4) No Vote Buying — These articles may have had noble intentions to help promote honesty, non-violence, property rights but most EOS users weren’t looking to the EOS blockchain for moral guidance or value judgements so these articles became insignificant.
Furthermore property rights disputes can surprisingly be arbitrary. Here is an example of how difficult it is to resolve a chain of ownership for property. If 1) Bob steals Alice’s key and takes her EOS and 2) Bob sells the stolen EOS to Charlie for US dollars and then 3) Charlie sells the EOS legitimately to Doug. There is a deadlock. You can argue both Doug & Alice legitimately own the EOS.
In regards to vote-buying there is a case to be made that vote-buying can be beneficial and optimal. 1) Corporate vote-buying is perfectly legal. 2) As described in the wikipedia article of The Calculus of Consent, Buchanan & Tullock explain how systems similar to vote-buying could be optimal: “The introduction of side payments is the crucial element, which would lead to optimality. In a sense the introduction of side payments creates marketable property rights of the individual political vote (Chapter 12)” My intuition is that the idea of quadratic voting that Vitalik Buterin has popularized in the blockchain space is actually less optimal than direct vote buying, but that’s a topic for another day.
Article 5) No Fiduciary — This was more of an assertion about the EOS system that would indemnify members from one another and distinguish the EOS platform from being a security or a public company. In some ways a CYA.
Article 6) Restitution, Article 7) Open Source & Article 9) Dispute Resolution — These articles were the foundation for Ricardian Contracts, base layer arbitration & ECAF . ECAF/base layer arbitration has turned out to be ineffective. ECAF was unprepared, inefficient, unscalable and ultimately superfluous because it has no enforcement power.
Article 12) Publishing — This article deals with copyright laws and is ambiguous and unenforceable. It seems like an attempt to have users comply with local publishing law while at the same time maintaining an anti-censorship stance.
Article 16) Developer Liability — It aims to protect developers from errors, but may be subjective, superfluous and contradict dispute resolution agreements.
Article 8) Language, 10) Choice of Law, 13) Informed Consent, 14) Severability, 15) Termination of Agreement, 17) Consideration 18) Acceptance 19) Counterparts — All these articles serve as an attempt to create a multi-party contract between all EOS members. Although it’s an extremely clever and creative design, there are likely many problems with this legal construct. From one perspective if this is an attempt to somehow create a system where each EOS user eventually has massive peer-to-peer bilateral contracts with every other user, each person should have to know each individual or list of people they are contracting with otherwise the ‘Counterparts’ article would be invalid. Furthermore peer-to-peer contracts require a real offer & acceptance, but the source, intent and desire for these contracts do not emanate from the peers themselves. These contracts would be at best forced arrangements. The fact that someone has to check an ‘I agree’ button on wallet software does not constitute a legally binding contract. There is no real offer, informed consent, acceptance & consideration. On the other hand if the Constitution is to be considered rules for a collective body or corporation, there would have to be an official representative, officer or delegate of that body to sign a contract on behalf of that body with each user on the network. This is clearly not the case with EOS. Furthermore the very creation of the Constitution did not evolve from a quorum of members of the body of EOS users. In typical organizations the body comes together in a general meeting to appoint a temporary chairman to elect officers, create bylaws etc. In the case of EOS it was written by a few people with input from a small minority of the entire EOS userbase. The design principles were largely based on Dan Larimer’s original blog articles. In any case the legitimacy of the Constitution itself is in question. Those who believe there is some significant obligation to the Constitution by virtue of it being part of the original code is not much more correct than someone believing a critical bug in the software has to remain there because it was there in the original code. When a situation occurs when a vast supermajority of users have no intent and desire to form a contract with each other, these so-called ‘contracts’ & Constitution are likely to be ignored and rightfully so. That is our current state of affairs. When the legal foundations are weak rather than de jure governance we have the de facto governance we see now.
