Bitpac

Publicly auditable cooperatives that live on bitcoin

What is a bitpac?

A bitpac is a cooperative whose members control some money and vote on how to spend it. It uses bitcoin multisig to enable group control and voting happens over nostr.

How can I try it?

Mainnet: https://supertestnet.github.io/bitpac/

Testnet: https://supertestnet.github.io/bitpac/?network=testnet

Video

So is this basically a DAO?

The short answer is yes. The long answer is no. Daos are supposed to be autonomous, which, at least to me, means humans do not control the decisions they make. Eth people have ruined the meaning of dao and turned it into "a smart conract where keyholders vote on how to spend some money." By that definition, yes, a bitpac is a dao. But to me, that's a perversion of the meaning. The only true dao would be a robot: a dao completely controlled by software. If actual people control the dao's money (through voting), then it's not a dao in my opinion, it's some kind of corporation -- in bitpac's case, a cooperative.

Why did you make this?

One day I was looking up reasons why altcoins are stupid and I came across this gem: https://forum.sushi.com/t/establish-sushi-legal-defense-fund/11813

Basically there's an ethereum "dao" called sushiswap. They got sued by the SEC. In response they created a proposal to use the funds held by the voters in their "dao" to hire lawyers to defend themselves. The vote passed and the money went to a bunch of lawyers.

I thought that was pretty stupid, but I liked the voting part. Voting on expenditures doesn't make you a dao (in my opinion), but it's still pretty neat. So I made this tool so that bitcoiners can do something similar. Create a multisig by selecting people's profiles from nostr, pick a threshold of how many votes are needed to move the money, and the result you get is a public page where any keyholder can propose how they'd like to spend the money. Every voter gets to accept or reject that proposal, and voila! It's like what sushiswap did except on bitcoin.

So this is nothing more and nothing less than a multisig. Why didn't you just call it a multisig? Why make a new name when "multisig" is fine?

A bitpac is a multisig with public auditability. Multisigs are usually private -- you normally don't disclose who's in them. With bitpac, you do. But if you just want to just call it a multisig that's fine with me. I still had fun making an interface for creating and managing multisigs, and I for one think this tool is unique enough that it merits a special name.

Todo list

• [x] Make proposals disappear if enough keyholders reject them
• [x] Make proposals disappear if they aren't passed in a month
• [x] Disallow subdust outputs
• [x] If a user proposes spending the max amount or very close to it, don't create a change output
• [x] Allow custom fees
• [x] Automatically broadcast transactions
• [x] Add loading animations
• [x] Make the page load faster
• [x] Warn about low fees
• [x] Display past proposals
• [x] Improve the user interface
• [x] Let bitpac members propose and vote on text statements, e.g. manifestos, besides monetary proposals
• [x] Add a menu: [Members] [Balance] [Statements] [Current proposals 0] [Past proposals 5]
• [x] On the members page show the name, the members, and the policy
• [x] On the balance page show the balance, the address, and a qr code
• [x] Make a splash page
• [x] Learn why I sometimes need to reload the page and fix it so I don't
• [x] Fix the issue where a voter can make proposals vanish by denying them many times
• [x] Display a countdown on each proposal for when it disappears
• [x] Ensure that approved and rejected proposals don’t disappear after the expiry
• [ ] Make the 1 month expiry on proposals configurable
• [ ] Let bitpacs add a proposal fee
• [ ] Add support for holding ecash in the treasury
• [ ] Let keyholders transfer or sell their voting rights