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The ongoing debate about Bitcoin's escalation continues to point to the fact that the protocol that will govern the system is one of the biggest challenges for this technology.

One of the various solutions proposed to respond to this challenge is the voting scheme through cryptocurrencies, through which Bitcoin users could "vote" to decide on protocol changes to be made in the network. A similar scheme already exists, and its name is Bitcoincracy, however, Bitcoin Core has been working on an alternative system before this fact.

Bitrated innovates the Bitcoin voting system

Recently, Nadav Ivgi, CEO of Bitrated, developed a solution to vote with digital currencies that aims to turn around the results of previous projects. His name is HODL.voting, and to exercise the voting, the user must block their bitcoins, losing access to them for a period of time.

Ivgi said that the idea is to associate the vote with a real cost to obtain more reliable answers. So far, Bitcoin-based voting systems allowed users to use the associated private keys to sign a message. In turn, this message would represent a vote, which would be added to all the others.

According to Ivgi, this configuration has weaknesses, because the fact that the vote does not have a cost, makes the entire voting system suspect, although access to bitcoins is required for this.

This means that all the participants of the operation (custodians, portfolios, exchanges, etc.) end up receiving an exaggerated power of vote in relation to the funds of the users. In fact, a person who is not informed about any debate, can not be motivated to vote based on what they want. Also, it would be very easy to bribe him to vote for a specific option.

A more reliable vote

Ivgi states that the solution to the problem is to implement a cost to the vote to make the process more reliable. In this way, any user who wishes to vote has to do so through a real cost, since this will show that they really know the option they will support.

The cost that HODL.voting will impose on users who wish to participate in the voting will be a temporary limitation of access to their bitcoins. As the user has more time to lose such access, the influence of their vote will be greater.

The user will send their bitcoins to a Bitcoin address that will block them to encode the vote. The vote will be valued according to the amount of bitcoins that have been blocked, multiplied by the time they will remain blocked.

An additional advantage of this system is that the custodians will not vote for the users. Users can withdraw their bitcoins whenever they wish, which is why converting them into inaccessible assets is not an option for exchange houses.

An initial version of HODL.voting is executed today in the Bitcoin tesnet. Although there is still much to be done, Ivgi affirms that the advances are promising to measure what the community feels in relation to the development problems of the Bitcoin network. In this way, the future of this technology can be positively affected by the decision of the users themselves.