Progress report

We’ve completed the initial design and implementation of the blockchain code for the Steem Proposal System. We have operations for creating proposals, voting on them, and removing them (if you decide to cancel your proposal for some reason). We’ve modified the command-line steem wallet to broadcast these new operations. We also have implemented the steemd-level APIs for fetching information about proposals that have been created.

Permalinks instead of URLs to describe proposals

One design change we made versus the BitShares implementation is that a proposal description will be a “permalink” to a Steem post instead of a URL. This means that Steem proposals should be made with a link to a corresponding post on the Steem blockchain that describes the proposal in depth.

We felt that a permalink was more appropriate than a URL, because it means that any changes made to a proposal will have an immutable historical record in the blockchain, and access to the proposal’s description won’t rely on a random web site’s uptime.

Upcoming Work

Our next steps are: 1) thoroughly test the new code, 2) update the javascript and python API libraries used by frontend applications like steemit.com, busy.org, esteem, parktiko, etc to allow display and voting on proposals, 3) add in the hardfork logic to enable the proposal system on a specific date and time, and 4) setup a public testnet.