Forward: EOS Rules, Rights and Reasonings v1
A Forward to A Governing Document Proposal for the EOS Blockchain.
Please read the Full Text of the proposal here…
You can read a Brief EOS 2018 Review here…
Forward:
Why I have written a governing document;
- to clearly yet reasonably define the role of block producers that informs the vote of token holders.
- to create a governing document that a reasonable person of reasonable intelligence, but without specific knowledge of the technology, reasonably and generally deduce what we are doing and not doing.
- to define the landscape to which we are all operating upon.
- to strengthen the feedback loop between token holders and block producers.
Why I like the EOS Rules, Rights and Reasonings
- It’s focused on detailing and clarifying the definition of the role of block producers and thereby setting the expectations of token holders and putting both parties into incentive alignment.
- All aspects of the system are under the direct influence of DPOS. That means there is no base layer arbitration or worker proposal system. Disputes over lost private keys or thievery should not dealt with at the base layer. However, if a separate referendum appears to make people whole who can cryptographically prove they lost keys, and it is driven by code and it get approved, great. But institutionalizing that workload of regularly unwinding lost keys onto block producers is the wrong direction.
- It declares Rights. Freedom of Expression | Freedom of Privacy | Freedom From Discrimination | Freedom to Transact | Freedom From Impersonation | Freedom to Proxy. Positively declaring the rights of the EOS Account Holders will communicate the ethos of the sanctity of the account and the role of block producers to protect it. These declared Rights represent a necessary psychological construct that the EOS community should cherish and protect.
- There is nothing for developers to code, or for block producers to test in order to implement this governing document. Base layer arbitration exists not in EOS code and only in the current constitution which this governing document seeks to replace, so eliminating it does not change any code. The worker proposal system does not exist in the current EOS code so no loss there either. This governing document should serve as a baseline for the next iteration.
- I didn’t write this governing document alone. Yes, I wrote some of it for sure. But many of you in the EOS community wrote it. And that’s what makes it so strong. It is an aggregation of what I consider to be the best of the best. I took the overall structure and spirit from the US Constitution, Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence. I shamelessly copied, pasted, edited, and rephrased ideas and text from the best of the Block.one Proposal for EOS Constitution v2.0, the EOS New York User Agreement v2.0, EOS Canada Knowledge Base, the Eos Amsterdam EOS Charter 3.0, the Korean proposal V4.0, EOS San Francisco EOS Constitution v2.1, EOS Alliance Project Synchronize and countless other sources in videos, podcasts, and articles too numerous to count or even recall to be honest. So if you recognize your voice in this document, it is by design, you are a contributor. Daniel Larimer and Brendan Blumer will recognize their own voices in the ‘Reasonings’ from their ‘Thought Leadership’ video series.
Reasonings
When The Governed Yearn,
For uncensored free speech,
For resistance to corruption and interference,
For many sources of truth in perfect accordance,
For solutions to protect life, liberty, and property,
For a peaceful society without the need for violence,
The People Resolve,
To decentralize everything,
To create an irreversible public record,
To recouple the unit of value with it’s creator,
To open the source of our creative endeavors to the world,
To use technology to achieve what governments cannot,
To allow the individual the oversight of security, efficiency, accountability, and transparency,
To reengineer business models,
To reimagine how we live our lives,
To align incentives and balance information asymmetries,
To build trust without intermediaries,
To create a community focused on the common good,
To dawn the next evolution of human assembly,
For a Freer and More Prosperous Society.
A Special Thanks
I want to make a special thank you to Thomas Cox, the EOS Alliance, and all the people hosting discussions on the topic of governance over the last six months. That is an invaluable service to the community and I hope it continues to grow. Education and engagement of the community is a key element to strengthening the feedback loop and making DPOS work. It’s not just a nice-to-have, it’s crucial.
The Path Forward
Naturally, the first thing we need to do is immediately pass our first EOS token-holder-supported governing document as a baseline. A governing document that reflects our current codebase so it can be ratified by block producers without delay!
I believe we should be listening to the voices of people like Marcin Zietek of Tokenika who promote the idea of giving DPOS a chance in it’s purest form, without anything that would add human intervention at the base layer beyond the role of block producers that operate under the direct influence of the EOS token holder vote. Then, if we as a community feel there is a need for additional checks and balances, we can add them thoughtfully and incrementally. That is a reasonable approach to this very new space of blockchain governance.
Some of my readers may have noticed that I previously put forth a proposal to add arbitration to the base layer. I still believe that we may be headed in that direction in the long run, but for a very limited set of cases, not involving lost or stolen keys or property, but for those narrow specific cases that involve block producer actions and system contracts. However, from a systems-point-of-view, we will be far, far, far better off if we can avoid any such feature that introduces at the base layer human intervention without the DPOS voting check to power. So we should gravitate towards the instinct of minimizing any friction at this foundational layer of our system and push our arbitrations systems into the dApp layer where dApps can choose and customize their own arbitration systems to fit their own user communities. In this way, very differing communities can co-exist on the same chain, all enjoying a fast, solid and reliable foundation of the EOS blockchain, while having their own interpretation of justice. As the EOS ecosystem grows, and more dApps emerge, the need for arbitration will grow, and we will see some dApps develop their own arbitration systems as well as a new class of dApp, the Arbitration System Provider, that will relieve dApps from creating or even maintaining their own arbitration systems, allowing them to focus on their core competencies while offering their communities remediation services when necessary.
Open Source
Of course I offer this governing document in the spirit of open source and encourage constructive criticism and other people to use this document just as I have used those of others.
EOS Rules, Rights and Reasonings
Please read the full text of the governing document proposal here…
Contact me on
Github: https://github.com/grahappa/EOS-Rules-Rights-and-Reasonings
