Blockchains and Governance: Interplanetary Database - BigchainDB & IPDB Meetup #4 - Mar 01, 2017
Blockchains and Governance: Interplanetary Database - BigchainDB & IPDB Meetup #4 - Mar 01, 2017
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Transcript of Blockchains and Governance: Interplanetary Database - BigchainDB & IPDB Meetup #4 - Mar 01, 2017
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Greg McMullen @gmcmullen
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Governance.
We hear this word a lot. Every white paper seems to have a section on governance thrown in.
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Why governance?
But why? What does governance do for us that it has become important?
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Accountability.
The first reason is to provide a measure of accountability.
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Accountability to participants.
Accountability to the participants. Designing systems that allow input on the operations of the network. In blockchain models this is usually based on economic & game theory models.
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Accountability to the public.
Governance an also provide accountability to the general public - whether they are taking part in the system or not.
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Responsiveness.
The other piece is responding to various situations when they arise.
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Responding to emergencies.
Responding to emergencies. We’ve seen this in blockchain governance with the response to The DAO.
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Responding to changing circumstances.
But governance is also about responding to changing circumstances - making sure things still work in a new world.
Bitcoin is struggling with this right now - inability to respond to increased demand and incentives that are out of alignment between users and miners.
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Blockchain governance -vs-
Traditional governance
When I say blockchain governance, I mean: technocratic systems of governance that are largely based on-chain - DAOs, and to some extent Eth and Bitcoin.
Traditional governance means alternative models: corporate law, administrative law, voluntary association, charities…
There’s a lot of talk about wanting code to be law, getting rid of the lawyers, replacing vagueness with hard code.
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Benefits of traditional?
There are some benefits to traditional governance!
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Out of beta.
Traditional governance has been running in production for hundreds of years. That’s given a lot of time to stomp out bugs. It’s a legacy system but it’s extremely resilient.
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Fault tolerant.
Of course it’s not always perfect. But the system is extremely resilient. It handles exceptions gracefully and flexibly.
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Interoperable.
Traditional governance models are interoperable with every legal system in the world, and allow organizations to interface with all other traditional organizations through a protocol called contract law, which is also out of beta and has been used in production for about 2,500 years.
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IPDB - for those who don’t know - is a public, scalable decentralized database with blockchain characteristics. It runs on a federated consensus model - so we pre-select the validating nodes.
We’ve decided to run IPDB on Traditional Governance platform.
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Legal personality.
We are registering as a charitable organization here in Germany. That means we are able to enter into contracts with any other legal person. This is an advantage over DAOs.
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Limited liability.
Because it’s a legal entity, the members and board members of IPDB can take part with limited legal liability for the activities of the organization.
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Accountability.
As a charitable organization, IPDB’s mission statement will be legally binding.
Supervised by the tax court - requires audited financial statements.
Annual member meetings. Minutes of meetings are public.
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Articles.Articles are law… and they are hard to change.
Not immutable, but what is? 2/3 majority to change the articles. 3/4 majority to dissolve.
Defines things like: Our mission statement. How the board is selected. Hard and fast rules about who can be a Caretaker. We’ve talked about this before but: all orgs, > 50% not for profit.
Also requires that IPDB works toward dissolving. If it does its mission it shouldn’t be required anymore. A legal requirement that prevents us from getting too comfortable with the cushy jobs.
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Here’s what IPDB looks like, as defined in the articles.
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Caretakers.Chosen for commitment to decentralized internet.
Articles require commitment to mission, > 50% not for profit…
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Board.Elected by Caretakers. We’ll be announcing soon.
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Staff.Hired by the Board to do day-to-day.
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Advisors.Help steer and provide advice.
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Bylaws.Easy to change. Super responsive. But very powerful.
More flexible rules like:Process for selecting Caretakers.Rules about who can be a Caretaker - wish list for diversity.Processes for day-to-day operations.Processes for making policies around security, privacy, key generation and storage, etc.
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Policies.Allow flexibility within structure with accountability to Board and Caretakers.
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Total recall.The ultimate accountability mechanism.
If the caretakers aren’t happy, they can vote to recall the board and replace em.
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Greg McMullen @gmcmullen