> If you can think of another way of defining "a majority" without needing a lot of CPU resources, a lot of people would be interested in hearing your solution.
Let Bitcoins equal votes.
Set up a Bitcoin account for each option in the vote; send Bitcoins to the account associated with the option you prefer. Transaction verification acts as an electoral audit.
That sort of system would give power over the money supply to those invested in the currency, which seems to be exactly what the Bitcoin community wants.
The question was how to allow clients to form a new consensus. I did not suggest using Bitcoins to verify transactions; rather, I suggested using verified transactions to verify the will of the Bitcoin community.
Forming a consensus isn't the problem; the problem is enforcing honest application of the new rules. Assuming the majority of people in the network are honest, you need some way of determining what that majority decides, within the network itself.
You have completely missed the point. Because the network can observe transactions, using a Bitcoin account as a ballot box, and Bitcoins as the votes, is a transparent, verified mechanism for determining the community's aggregate will.
This approach negates the incentive to create sham clients under a one-client-one-vote system; it has the same benefit over IP-based voting systems, or what have you. Voting with Bitcoins means that that every participant in the economy has a voting power equal to his account balance (if the Bitcoins are returned after voting) or the number of Bitcoins he both has and is willing to give up to affect the vote's outcome (if they are not returned). So those who are more invested in the Bitcoin economy would have more (or potentially more) power to determine the rules of the economy.
I'm not saying that you can't use bitcoins as votes. You could; but any change to the rules needs to be also be enforced within the network, right? So you need some mechanism for figuring out the majority within the network, which obviously can't be done with bitcoins.
Let Bitcoins equal votes.
Set up a Bitcoin account for each option in the vote; send Bitcoins to the account associated with the option you prefer. Transaction verification acts as an electoral audit.
That sort of system would give power over the money supply to those invested in the currency, which seems to be exactly what the Bitcoin community wants.