Subject: [Din] Governance principles and models (Was: Updated charter proposal)

From: Frode Kileng <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2018 09:59:07 +0200

Hi.

I think an important lesson from the main public blockchains in 
operations today is that they are definitively not autonomous and 
mechanisms are needed to handle the future evolution and problems caused 
by bugs, human errors, attacks. And that unclear rules and faulty 
mechanisms undermines the trust and the success of the chains. Se for 
example the  "constitutional mess" of the ($4bn) EOS blockchain is just 
the latest example (*) or the Ethereum chain split (**). Or how an 
ad-hoc community effort was needed to save bitcoin when an integer 
overflow bug  "created ~92bn more bitcoins than can exists" (***) and 
when node sw upgrade that caused a bitcoin chain split lasting for 24 
blocks / 6 hours (****).

Although you could argue that such mechanisms and rules are covered by 
the charter text "Trust management and delegation in decentralized 
communication settings", I do recommend to state it more explicitly as 
both a research challenge and in the list of objectives, i.e. defining 
the blockchain governance principles and governance model(s) to enforce 
them.

Best regards
Frode Kileng

(*) 
https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/06/19/eos-cryptocurrency-constitution/, 
https://www.techinasia.com/eos-at-risk,
(**) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum#The_DAO_event
(***) https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident
(****) https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0050.mediawiki