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pmlaw / The-Bitcoin-Foundation-Legal-Repo

A public repo for legal documents related to The Bitcoin Foundation
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Anonymity and Funding #19

Open ABISprotocol opened 10 years ago

ABISprotocol commented 10 years ago

The purpose of this issue is to explore the topic of Anonymity and Funding.

Some more details and observations are added as part of this open issue, below, along with a tentative proposal. Observations:

  1. The Bitcoin Foundation funds bitcoin development through payment of staff to work on the bitcoin/bitcoin repository.
  2. The Bitcoin Foundation is a nonprofit organization with Bylaws.
  3. The Bitcoin Foundation's Bylaws do not presently contain any text which would require funds be spent on bitcoin development, nor is there any stipulation to indicate or prioritize how funds from membership dues will be spent.
  4. Bitcoin users' privacy, choice, and anonymity are threatened by a variety of actors, including, but not limited to random malicious individuals, many thousands of corporations with an interest in obtaining user information without the users' consent, and governments (including, but not limited to, the governments of NY State (within the USA), the UK (House of Commons, with recent DRIP passage there and enactment by "royal assent"), China, and the Russian Federation, as examples). As an additional observation related to this point, nearly all methods of use of bitcoin do not offer either privacy or anonymity, and a tremendous amount of information about the user is released through routine use of bitcoin.
  5. The Bitcoin Foundation's Bylaws do not presently contain any text which would require or prioritize funding of privacy, or of anonymity, as part of the bitcoin protocol through the bitcoin development process. However, the Bylaws do contain a reference under "Purposes" to "promot(ion) and protect(ion)" of "individual choice, participation and financial privacy." (The definition of privacy is distinct from the definition of anonymity, and in turn, anonymity (as expressed in mathematics and software, with one example provided here) is not the same as privacy or pseudonymity. A brief Electronic Frontier Foundation post on anonymity is also provided for reference.)
  6. Under Article II (Purposes), the Bitcoin Foundation Bylaws currently state: "Section 2.1 Purposes: The Corporation is an association of persons having a common business interest, the purpose of which is to promote that common business interest and to engage in any lawful activity permitted under section 501(c)(6) of the Internal Revenue Code, or the corresponding section of any future federal tax code. More specifically, the purposes of the Corporation include, but are not limited to, promotion, protection, and standardization of distributed-digital currency and transactions systems including the Bitcoin system as well as similar and related technologies.

Section 2.2 The Corporation shall promote and protect both the decentralized, distributed and private nature of the Bitcoin distributed-digital currency and transaction system as well as individual choice, participation and financial privacy when using such systems. The Corporation shall further require that any distributed-digital currency falling within the ambit of the Corporation's purpose be decentralized, distributed and private and that it support individual choice, participation and financial privacy."

Proposal:

  1. That in the Bylaws, the (Article II) section 2.2 describing "individual choice, participation and financial privacy" should be expanded to read as follows: "individual choice, participation, financial privacy, and anonymity."
  2. That in the Bylaws, there shall also be a portion added to (Article II) section 2.2 which stipulates the following, or something like it: the Foundation shall "prioritize funds (from funds that are available as a result of member dues payments) for basic development of the bitcoin protocol, so as to increase the number of persons who are paid to clear basic development backlog and maintenance, as the highest priority. Additionally, priority shall also be given to proposals that provide funding for anonymity in development of the bitcoin protocol. Where competing proposals present a funding choice between privacy and anonymity development, the proposal that offers full financial anonymity shall be given higher priority in consideration of grants and other funding decisions of the Board of Directors, in any system of ranking of proposals which is utilized to present proposals for the Board's consideration."

Open for discussion.

ABISprotocol commented 8 years ago

Although no action was taken on this in 2014, there is now possibility that this will go to vote in 2015 or early 2016. See recent discussion on this under pull request #23 ~ cc: @BruceFenton