We’ve seen many new members join the discussion over the past 3 weeks since the EOS mainnet launch, and it is difficult to keep up with all of the different ideas related to governance or know how certain documents were developed, due to the fast pace of discussion. In our shared interest of transparency, the EOS Detroit team is attempting to recap the major events and rationale that led to the temporary EOS Constitution and provide an overview of what is being worked on by the community in terms of governance.
The goal for EOS Detroit is to continue to release a post in a regular format of highlights and developments that occur with governance telegram chats and other avenue, as well as provide positions where appropriate and if necessary.
The majority governance discussion occurs in two places, the EOSGov telegram channel, and the EOSGo forums. The EOS Detroit team thanks EOS New York, EOSREAL, EOS Canada, EOS Authority, EOS Australia, EOS Cafe and many other block producers for their contributions to the community.
This constitution is intended to be a temporary constitution that will be replaced within 120 days of the launch of mainnet. EOS Detroit supports future changes to the constitution that allow for member disputes to be handled through on-chain mechanisms, preferably smart contracts, more seamlessly.
Relevant Telegram Groups
Relevant Forums
Relevant Githubs
Starting in Mid-May, the EOSREAL team reached out to a group of other block producer candidates and respected EOS Community members. EOS Detroit made minor edits to EOS Real’s original timeline to provide clarity for this blog post.
Thoughts and feedback were submitted to EOSREAL on the EOSGo forum, in their telegram channel, or in private message channels established directly between the EOSREAL and participants. Each day, the feedback was summarized by the EOSREAL team and posted in the EOSGo forum. A summary of all the posts can be found on EOSREAL’’s forum profile. A majority of the feedback came from other block producer candidates, but many other community members were actively involved. Thomas Cox also participated by clarifying the intent of documents and intellectually challenging proposed changes.
Two conference calls occurred, one at a time convenient for Asian community members and the other for US/European community members. The format of the calls were to visit each article of the Constitution, Block Producer Agreement, baseline Arbitration guidelines, and proposed article additions (from the week of feedback collection) and attendees could ask questions, voice concerns, or propose changes to each. Changes The calls were recorded, and can be found on the EOSGo forum unedited. The US/European call lasted approximately 4.5 hours and around 40 community members participated in discussion throughout the call.
The end result of what came from the “General Assembly” formed from EOS REAL’s efforts can, posted the morning of May 30th be found here.
After constitution concensus exercise, EOSREAL proposed establishing the Generally Assembly, similar to the United Nations General Assembly, where policy discussions could be conducted in an official manner. There has not been much movement on the proposed charter at the time this article was published.
On May 30th, Block.one released a revised version of the constitution incorporating many of the sentiments and feedback from the EOSREAL. The differences between the previous draft, constitution, which is no longer published, can be found here.
Thomas Cox’s explanation of the changes can be found here.
Note: This is an old version of the constitution and is included for historical purposes only.
The EOSGov chat caught fire again after additional changes were made to the constitution after the initial revisions on the 30th. Additional articles were added to the constitution. The difference comparison can be found on Github here.
Many members of the community took issue with the following articles or Ricardian contracts:
Article I - Non-Violence
Members shall not initiate violence or the threat of violence against another Member.
Note: This article was updated again after May 31st.
Article XVII - Termination of Agreement
A Member is automatically released from all revocable obligations under this Constitution 3 years after the last transaction signed by that Member is incorporated into the blockchain. After 3 years of inactivity an account may be put up for auction and the proceeds distributed to all Members by removing EXAMPLE from circulation.
Token Transfer Agreement (Ricardian contract)
I, {{from}}, certify the following to be true to the best of my knowledge:
I certify that {{quantity}} is not the proceeds of fraudulent or violent activities.
I certify that, to the best of my knowledge, {{to}} is not supporting initiation of violence against others.
I have disclosed any contractual terms & conditions with respect to {{quantity}} to {{to}}.
I understand that funds transfers are not reversible after the {{transaction.delay}} seconds or other delay as configured by {{from}}'s permissions.
If this action fails to be irreversibly confirmed after receiving goods or services from '{{to}}', I agree to either return the goods or services or resend {{quantity}} in a timely manner.
Note: This Ricardian contract was updated shortly after it was published as outline below and only included for historical reference.
Minimalist Constitution Suggestions
The modified Article I, Article XVII, and the “Know Your Customer” clause caused a contingent of community members in the EOSGov telegram chat to call for either replacing the draft with a minimal constitution or launching without a constitution at all.
The proposed minimalist constitution(s) written by these community members can be found on the EOSGo forum:
An effort led by EOS New York to establish a community github and work out some compromises between the minimalist constitution and the launch/revise was hatched.
The owners of the community Github are either well respected long-time BP candidate governance discussion participants (ex: Mao - EOSREAL) or well respected non-affiliated members (ex: Nathan James - Scatter). The following statement was released by EOS New York in conjunction with a large group of BPs active in the EOS launch process at that time.
Members of the EOSGA (General Assembly) group and Block Producers came together to propose compromises to some of the concerns raised in the EOSGov chat by posting
Constitution
Article I - No Initiation of Violence
Members shall not initiate violence or the threat of violence against another Member. Lawful prosecution of crimes with the goal of preserving life, liberty and property does not constitute initiation of violence.
The constitution was changed from being the permanent constitution to one that would be temporary with the addition of Article XX.
Article XX - Interim Constitution
This constitution is interim and is intended to remain in effect until a permanent constitution is written and ratified in a referendum.
Block Producer Agreement
A major change occurred to the block producer agreement, over concerns that a 1% threshold was too low to be a feasible reporting requirement. It is not unrealistic for an investor to obtain 1% of a block producer through a proxy. This particular phrase was changed from all owners to direct owners, and increased the ownership threshold from 1% to 10%.
I, {{producer}}, hereby agree to disclose and attest under penalty of perjury all direct shareholders and all ultimate beneficial owners of my company who own more than 10%.
Members of the EOSGA group spent the greater part of the day and evening cleaning up the community Github repository. The changes were minor, with the most notable being changing the token symbol back to EOS from SYS.
Thomas Cox, the expert leading the governance developments, alerted the EOSGov channel to a reversal of the change of the primary arbitration forum from the ICC, an off-chain international arbitration forum, back to ECAF (EOS Core Arbitration Forum), the community run on-chain arbitration forum.
The primary concern with using the ICC is losing sovereignty over dispute resolution. Thomas Cox wrote an extensive post explaining the reversal that can be found on the EOSGo Forum here, that outlines other issues such as the high cost to dispute claims through the ICC.
The constitution that was launched with mainnet only serves as a temporary stop gap. It will need to be either ratified as-is, amended, or in a completely new form. This process is expected to take no more than 120 days from launch, and efforts are currently underway by the EOSGA group to develop a process and smart contracts for ratifying a new constitution.
EOS Detroit will be continuing their coverage of governance developments as we work towards ratifying a constitution. Various members of the community have debated amendments to the constitution and proposed new constitution, with the most notable coming from Dan Larimer himself and mirrored on the Block.one website here. Block.one also announced that they would be staking their tokens to vote for block producers that meet certain criteria and that they would encourage the block producers to increase the number of votes per account from 30 to 50. It is important to note that the proposed constitution does not automatically replace the constitution that was launched with the mainnet, and must be proposed and ratified via that process.
ECAF continues to develop it’s arbitration procedures after a rocky first couple of weeks that included releasing orders to freeze accounts off-chain via PDFs. On Tuesday, 6/26/2018, ECAF released their draft proposal for the official notification system. If the proposed constitution from Block.one ends up being ratified, the role of ECAF would be severely limited, but it may make nurturing the forum much easier for the volunteer team in its infancy. EOS New York also wrote an excellent recap of the current situation and proposal to clarify ECAF’s role in the relevant agreements.
The Worker Proposal system is also being developed in the background and a charter project and timeline was released by Thomas Cox on June 20th. A series of calls were held to discuss with Thomas Cox answering questions about the worker proposal system and how it will potentially work. These calls took place on June 21st and 22nd. The best recording of the the two Q/A sessions will be posted.
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