Hey everyone,
Very exciting to see the voting function in the new wallet!
These are still the first steps along a very exciting journey.
The ecosystem we have been discussing and dreaming, hoping, planning, is beginning to form.
All we need to do is get the first few moves right and the system protects and grows itself.
Bitcoin is so beautiful in its simplicity and design and thanks to that, made all of this possible.
Like mentioned before, the cryptocurrency system as a whole is busy evolving every second and all of it predicted on the Bitcoin foundation.
It reminds me a bit of Conway's Life or a complicated game of dominoes: beginning conditions are everything.
The only problem is that the natural selection and evolution happening in crypto world is very haphazard with so much reiteration and replication that a lot of energy goes to waste. In that wasted space is where my dreams grow for an "intelligent" cryptocurrency (doesn't really matter which one but Silkcoin by far the closest by virtue that the community and hence the coin itself has already hijacked its own further development.)
I imagine it a bit like a colony of ants trying to build a sand castle.
Bitcoin is the template of what this small creature, the unit of worker (an ant in my scenario) should look like.
It has all the features needed to pick up sand and move it from one spot to another. Fully self sufficient.
The only problem is that with all the other ants it has a hard time coordinating the actual structure of what it is building.
Of course there are mechanisms in place, a form of communication based on smells, pheromones and other clues, that help the ants communicate and some form of building to take shape.
With Silkcoin I hope for a metamorphosis. If we have the basic template for an organism to move sand from one place to another (the work performed in our scenario), why not expand on this idea until we don't need a hundred other clones? Why not take those elements but make our worker grow in size, give it a new nervous system, a better brain? Now instead of a colony of ants building a sandcastle it will more resemble a human building a sand castle. A single entity with many parts that all make up a unit and work in concert to build something that the individual ants could not even dream of.
The feedback system, the nervous system starts with the wallet and communication and voting as an integral part of it.
Our developers are not just programmers, they are genetic engineers, creating a new life form.
At the moment we have one topic we are voting on:
You're voting for: Voting platform URL
1. vote.silkcoin.io (52%)
2. soapbox.silkcoin.io (17%)
3. poll.silkcoin.io (30%)
It costs 10 SILK to vote. I voted for option 1.
I personally feel that my SILK gained from staking is fair game to be used in voting and enhancement. It did not cost me anything, I keep my wallet open to support the infrastructure.
I would be happy to send all my SILK gained from staking to causes I care about.
The SILK used in voting ends up being sent to a specific address that accumulates this fund.
The website to host the voting ideas is being created (hence us voting on it).
I have not spoken to the dev team about the future implementation so everything from here on is conjecture:
All the basic elements already exist to make this possible:
Bob wants SILK to incorporate a marketplace idea.
He wants a tab on the left that says "Bazaar" and if you click on it, it shows you a list of items/services that are linked to a Silkcoin address and is priced in $/BTC/SILK. Vendors can list items as per any other online marketplace, except he envisions a semi-decentralized version that pulls data from multiple sources (a bit like the "Market Data" tab). Bob has an idea for increased security by having the data supplied encrypted and then decrypted by the wallet based on a vendor supplied key. He also has an idea for having some vendors blocked or delisted for objectional sales/material based on community feedback and vote. (Examples of objectional sales would be nuclear weapons or your mother.)
So Bob wants to raise funds for this as well as get community feedback on the merits of the idea.
He is well known in the community and trusted so people are happy to use him as the escrow for the "idea/vote fund".
If he wasn't, he would have to find someone trusted or take the slim chance that people will find him trustworthy.
Now he submits his idea to vote.silkcoin.io.
In the wallet there now appears under "Polls" tab: Bob's bazaar idea.
There is a link to a forum or other site with more information.
There is a drop down menu with options as discussed and contained in the extra information.
Space is limited on the "Polls" tab, so Bob has to put up a certain amount of SILK to have his idea listed.
He thinks this will really help the whole of Silkcoin and cryptocurrency so he sells his electric guitar which he never plays for $1000 and buys SILK. This SILK he submits to the vote fund and can be traced on blockchain explorer.
Since this vote now has a significant fund backing it, it rises to the top 20 of votes running and appears in the "Polls" tab.
Now Mary opens her wallet.
She has 50 000 SILK because she was a clever early adopter.
She really likes Bob's idea and an implementation described as option 2 makes the most sense to her and looks like the one most likely to be feasible. (Alternatively Bob has perhaps already found a developer who said it would be possible to do this and will take on the job if he could raise $20 000 and option 2 is in fact this developer who Mary has heard of before and trusts.)
So now Mary funnels her SILK gained from staking into option 2 of this specific idea.
Mary is not unique in thinking this is a good idea and another 50 people join her in the same way.
Bob set the time to 6 months to gain enough exposure and raise enough funds.
At the end of 6 months it is obvious which option won and how much SILK was raised and the SILK is now available to make the idea chosen by the community a reality.
While it is being implemented, the SILK in the vote wallet is silently staking and becoming more valuable.
A brilliant developer unleashes the new wallet with Bazaar implemented.
Bob pays the developer from the vote fund, conditions of payment or refund all described as per a contract on the initial idea-submission-page on vote.silkcoin.io.
End of story of Bob.
Jack came along later with an idea of how to make the whole system function without requiring reputation or trust but that is another story for another time.