Governance in a Decentralised System
BOScoin: Self-Evolving Cryptocurrency Platform
The design of any system requires good thinking into how things interconnect and the overall operations and processes governing it. Understanding this governance framework may provide good insight into the underlying purpose.
What is Governance?
Governance is essentially a set of diverse set of rules regulating a system; many of your interactions are managed by governing rules, for example traffic rules during your daily commute, employment policies governing how you work, and store policies governing how you purchase items to name a few.
Although there are a vast range of different governing systems, Rachel Gisselquist has summarised that these governance systems have three common elements: The (1) process in which (2) power or authority is exercised to (3) manage the collective affairs of a community/system.[1]
Governance evolves over time to meet the growing demand. If we take the example of a government, it is evident that there are constantly new and evolving policies created to ensure the ecosystem is intact and operating in a manner to fit for purpose. Generally, people choose a government based on their principles and planned direction of policies they believe will benefit the system.
Governance in Decentralised Systems
When Bitcoin came along, decentralization was the key to its value proposition. It is a system which consists of incentivized voluntary peers both from the operation of nodes to the development of the code. Although this inherent trustlessness is what many adopters latched on to, it has also become one of the reasons for the constant stalemates when making decisions and applying changes to the network. Although Bitcoin may escape the existing political framework of government institutions, there is still a lot of invisible politics going on within the Bitcoin ecosystem.[2] This lack of transparency is one of the main causes for distrust arising from its users.
Decentralized systems, like Bitcoin need to acknowledge that politics do exist and not every problem can be solved by providing the right incentives. After acknowledging the limits of self-government in non-transparent political environments, we can start to learn from solutions found in many modern day democracies. ‘The underlying assumption of assumption is that the only way to ensure legitimacy of collective decisions is by making conflicts apparent and by discussing and challenging ideas within the public sphere.’[2]
BOScoin’s Decentralised Governance System
As decentralised systems aim to provide the authority and decisions to the community, BOScoin’s fundamental structure is designed to ensure the legitimacy of collective decisions. This is done by providing the structure and rules for discussing and challenging ideas publically as part of the initial construct of the platform. The BOScoin platform will be designed with an embedded voting system. Anyone in the community or anyone who owns BOS, aka the BOScoin currency can upload proposals to the platform and after sufficient debate and conversation, Members of the Congress Network(Node Operators) can cast their votes on the proposals.
Not only can these proposals be used to fund projects related to the community, as they can also fundamentally change the rules of the system; and anyone can be part of the Congress Network by fulfilling some simple conditions (i.e. freezing a certain amount of BOS and running a node), hence the voting rights is essentially open to anyone who wishes to join.
This design was based on three reasons, to ensure the community is well represented, to ensure security of the system, and to ensure an evolving system.
At BOScoin, we believe anyone should have the right to participate in the decision making process. This is one of the reasons our consensus protocol(Modified Federated Byzantine Agreement) allows for new node operators to enter the network. Hopefully many people will participate in the system and over time evolve into a truly self-governing and self-sustainable decentralized platform.
Sources:
[1] Gisselquist, R. (2012), Good Governance as a Concept and Why This Matter for Development Policy, UNU-Wider
[2] Atzori, M. (2015), Blockchain Technology and Decentralized Governace: Is the State Still Nexessary?
[3] Habermas, J. (1989), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Cambridge: Polity Press
