RE: Proposal for an incremental Constitution and Dapp layer governance on EOS
As one of these people in Governance list promoting the cause, I understand the world-weariness of all the people on the different sides of the debate. But it doesn't help to believe and promote falsehoods which this article does - if you believe in false assumptions, your logic cannot result in useful conclusions. Some remarks about the early parts of this article. If I get time I'll write more.
For example, the statement "ECAF is more mature than many realize." That was true. ECAF was ready. What it wasn't ready for was a flood of cases. It was ready for a few cases. The cases and work that has been done so far has been pretty good, but any flood will drown the best swimmer.
Saying it's not true has to be compared to the alternate. There is no viable alternate as no other forum would respond as fast, and the BPs would have just dropped the ball. ECAF was as ready as it could be in the circumstances, we just miscalculated the load. And it wouldn't have mattered anyway because we and everyone else couldn't meet that load.
Next. Your implied criticism of the Constitution that there aren't the stated actions of enforcement e.g., Article I. That's exactly how it should be. If we had stated actions, the document would be 100 pages or 1000, and people would be spending all their time paying for lawyers to arbitrage it. Instead, principles should be tested by community and battled over in arbitration. Yes, it isn't a checklist. And that is a good thing, because no checklist survives society.
(BTW, I agree thatr most of the clauses in the C need to be rewritten.)
Contributions. The tiny group that worked on the C is about the same as the tiny group that worked on the code. We wanted more people to help, but we can lead the horses to water, not make them drink. It's not a mistake, it's the reality of bootstrapping a mainnet chain of this size.
As an aside, I strongly agree that the C should be short, consise, readable by maximum amount of readers. The current one is too long, and the proposal by @eosnewyork is written in american legalese.
Next. Referendum isn't the wonderful tool you hope it is. The results will be very expensive and you might be surprised: There is no democracy in EOS, and the diversity of opinion isn't clear. The opinion on some of the groups is not matched by the stakeholder value.
"v2" is internally not a constitution. For a set of rules to be rules, there has to be compulsory enforcement of the rules. Otherwise they are mere philosophies, not contracts. Because the arbitration proposal is only over DApp level, the C itself is unarbitral. Which means breaching any component of the C is uncontrolled. One could argue that the BPs will enforce it, but I wouldn't be betting anyone's EOS on that, because, you know who is going to breach the C and get away with it, right? :-)
If ECAF were ready, then why was there no secure method of communication set up with block producers? Block producers didn't know who were members of ECAF and who weren't. Talking of logic; To say it was ready, just not for any kind of volume is to admit it wasn't ready. You have admitted before (Telegram) that ECAF wasn't ready, so I'm not sure why you're now trying to say it was.
If the Constitution was designed to be vague as you say - then it has succeeded. The problem with vagueness is - it doesn't work well on blockchains. We need certainty. Vagueness ensures the requirement for some type of body to sit in judgement - an ideal scenario for those seeking positions within such a body.
Tiny group working on the C - Yes, there was no way around that other than to wait for more people to join the debate (which is still only very small percentage wise).
The article stipulates that the referendum should be used sparingly. So providing we don't have an ambiguous and lengthy constitution that's riddled with inconsistency, then the referendum will be a great tool for setting the direction we want our blockchain to head in. A lot of the mundane stuff can be voted on by block producers.
I agree with you about EOS not being a democracy.
If the C is just a set of rules rather than a vague set of principles, then there won't be a requirement to arbitrate on the base layer. If BPs somehow get around these coded rules, then it's up to the community to judge the rights and wrongs using their votes. Admittedly, this would be way more directly responsive and democratic if it were 1 person 1 vote, but that's another topic entirely.
How could there be a secure method of communications set up with people who didn't exist?
You said ECAF was in an advanced state of readiness with a list of arbiters and administrative processes all in place. I disagreed and said this wasn't true and nothing you have said has changed my opinion on this.
ECAF's readiness or lack thereof appears to change as and when it suits your argument.
If ECAF were ready, then regardless of which BPs got elected, ECAF could have stipulated their chosen method of communication so BPs knew who they were dealing with. They didn't and this caused a great deal of confusion. BPs had no way of knowing who was a member of ECAF and who was a fake.
I still don't think you quite grasp the concept of needing to prove your worthiness before requesting such positions of power.
lol... it's always possible to cherry pick one little point and use that to proove the other guy is "false".
"Advanced state of readiness" is a subjective thing, not a thing provable by one detailed question.
Overall, ECAF was ready because it was able to handle the cases that came in. Look at the history of the 7 frozen accounts. ECAF did its thing, returned its results. As far as I can see, no particular case was badly handled beyond what you would expect in the normal starting phase of a complex and complicated operation.
(And did so securely. BPs were not confused. BPs knew who they were talking to. It might be that the public saw confusing results. But that's not the same as the BPs being confused.)
Ian, I respect you greatly, but I feel you are not recalling recent history correctly. Please read the article below written by a very dismayed and very respected block producer:
https://medium.com/eos-new-york/the-state-of-eos-governance-ecaf-regarbiter-401c073d622d
No - those are your words. I won't respond to that strawman, instead better to concentrate on what I said:
A founding document such as that in EOS should always be brief and principled. Elsewise nobody will read it and understand it.
'Your implied criticism of the Constitution that there aren't the stated actions of enforcement e.g., Article I. That's exactly how it should be.' Yes, I took this to mean vague.
I guess by making them brief and principled it actually creates a job for you guys...
A group of people with expertise in this will no doubt emerge regardless of how it is written. But, better a clear, short readable document of principles that the community can understand and get involved with if it needs to ... than an indeciferable code that results in a guild to protect their secret wisdom.