At the request of sigmike I would like to make a modification to the B&C 5.0 specifications, which are described in the original post.

There has been discussion around adding the capability to abstain from voting when minting for a long time, going back to at least December 2014 when woodstockmerkle wrote about the possibility.

I have been wary of any solution that would require shareholders to actively and specifically vote no on a grant or motion to prevent its passage. There is, however, a limited manner in which abstentions can be employed without creating a situation where "no" voting is a necessity. Rather than set default data feed providers, I am persuaded that simply setting the default voting behavior on a new install to abstain is the best course of action to address the noise that comes from apathetic voting. We can do this with a simple check box labeled "Abstain" located to the right of the voting buttons on the Voting tab.

Blocks found by abstaining minters simply won't count when deciding whether a motion or grant has passed. Consider a scenario where 50% of blocks in a 10,000 block series have an abstention. This would mean that only 2501 blocks need to have a vote for a particular grant in order for it to pass.

We will still be including a new drop down list of data feed providers, so they will be much easier to select and configure than they are now. We just won't automatically set a default.

Other than these changes, the 5.0 release is now code complete. Hopefully the team will be able to make the changes quickly and we can release very soon.