[bisq-contrib] Phase Zero: A plan for bootstrapping the Bisq DAO

[Chris Beams]

We published and announced the Phase Zero plan a couple weeks ago [1,2], but now that the bisq-contrib list is up and running, I wanted to re-announce it here as well.

Here’s the abstract:

> We present an overview of Bisq, a peer-to-peer exchange network designed for secure, private and censorship-resistant trading of bitcoin for national currencies and other cryptocurrencies. We demonstrate that while Bisq already provides users with a high degree of security and privacy through decentralized architecture and other protections, the project cannot achieve the degree of censorship resistance it requires without first decentralizing its funding and governance. We review the Bisq DAO and BSQ token that have been designed to achieve this goal and we analyze the risks inherent to rolling them out. We conclude by presenting the Phase Zero plan for a pre-release period in which each aspect of the Bisq DAO is operationalized in an incremental and risk-mitigating fashion. Compensation, voting, bonding and other DAO use cases commence immediately as high-trust operations in a testing environment and iterate toward trust-minimized operations in production. BSQ stake is tracked on Bitcoin testnet during Phase Zero such that BSQ may be earned but not traded or spent. Completion of Phase Zero is marked by a BSQ genesis distribution on Bitcoin mainnet and a Bisq application release supporting BSQ trading and other key DAO use cases.

I hope folks will find the first part of the document to be the best available overview of what Bisq is, why we built it, how it works, what makes it different, and so on. This content should probably replace our existing Bisq whitepaper at some point. Perhaps someone wants to take that on.

The paper was developed in conjunction with a talk given at Hackers Congress 2017, and you can find the slide deck for that talk at [3]. Also, the first 15 minutes of the video interview at [4] provides a pretty complete overview of Bisq, the Bisq DAO and the Phase Zero plan—it’s basically a recap of the talk given at the Congress.

In any case, this is very much a living document, and you’ll notice that we’re making changes to it as the plan itself changes. Feedback and questions are most welcome.

- Chris

[1]: https://github.com/bisq-network/docs/blob/master/dao/phase-zero.adoc
[2]: https://twitter.com/bisq_network/status/921551113463222274
[3]: https://goo.gl/dpHGZx
[4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvXWToT-dcQ
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP
URL: <http://lists.bisq.network/pipermail/bisq-contrib/attachments/20171103/51079ef1/attachment.sig>