Rather than settling for governance infrastructure that is just good enough to get the job done, we opted to create what we consider to be the ideal infrastructure for self-governance of a cryptocurrency. We call our system for storing governance data Politeia, which is based on the ancient Greek term, meaning “a system of government”. Politeia is a system for storing off-chain data that is both versioned and timestamped, essentially “git, a popular revision control system, plus timestamping”. Instead of attempting to store all the data related to Decred’s governance on-chain, we have opted to create an off-chain store of data that is anchored into Decred’s blockchain, minimizing its on-chain footprint. While we will use it …
Per the 2017 Decred Roadmap, one of the major deliverables is a proposal system that allows users to participate in the governance of Decred. The proposal system will have 2 main components: a blockchain-based timestamping service and a public version-controlled repository for proposal data. The subject of this entry is dcrtime, the timestamping component. Dcrtime was written by Marco Peereboom over the past couple months and is the result of collaboration between Marco, Jake Yocom-Piatt and Dave Collins. The primary motivation for dcrtime is the desire for the proposal system to have maximum transparency and accountability, while having a minimal onchain footprint. In terms of its onchain footprint and overall design, dcrtime draws on …