Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Towards a means of measuring user support for Soft Forks

From: Erik Aronesty <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2022 16:13:35 -0400

>
>
>
> Have you taken a look at my proposal
> <https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-March/020146.html>?
> The proposal is, to be clear, *not* "voting" but rather polling that isn't
> programmatically connected to activation. The intention is for people
> (developers) to look at the polling results and make an educated analysis
> of it as far as how it should contribute to consensus gathering.
>

it's cool, and i agree it's somewhat censorship resistant

> Let's say everyone who participates in polling broadcasts it along the
> bitcoin network (a separate network would probably be better, so as to not
> interfere with normal bitcoin, but I digress),
>

right, anyone can then publish a json file with polling aggregates at a
certain block height and anyone can quickly check to see if they are lying
or missing data

> Similar structures could be added to any script configuration to allow
> signing of polls without any significant exposure.
>

rubin's suggestion around tapscript anon voting could help with anonymity

.... all of this is cool ...

but it doesn't address the "what about people who don't know there's a vote
going on"  or other the other social issues with "weighted polling" in
general, like how nonexperts can "have a say" when they simply don't
understand the relevant issues.  i personally feel like i'm "only a very
little bit up on the issues" and i have more tech knowledge than most
people i know

also, it will just be a poll of "people who pay attention to the dev list
and maybe some irc rooms"

might be worth experimenting with... but unless there's a great ux around
the tooling my guess is that it won't garner a lot of meaningful data:

open source, simple cli, gitian build, installs easily on all platforms,
works well with bitcoind rpc, works with ledger, can import a seed, etc.