Bitcoin Choices is a project built as part of the 2022 MIT Bitcoin Expo Hackathon 2022. MIT Bitcoin Expo Website: https://www.mitbitcoinexpo.org/

Bitcoin Choices is a scalable voting solution for Bitcoin built by a team of developers from the Choice Coin DAO for the 2022 MIT Bitcoin Expo Hackathon. DevPost Submission: https://devpost.com/software/choice-coin-bitcoin-choices

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRQe6bZcgT0

Bitcoin transactions take a long time and often cost hundreds or thousands of dollars to facilitate because of the high cost of energy required to validate blocks. There exists a need for a way to securely vote with Bitcoin in a cost-efficient and timely manner to facilitate governance for the Bitcoin network. Defined, the Bitcoin governance problem is how can Bitcoin be used for fast, scalable, and secure voting with instantaneous results?

The solution is Bitcoin Choices, a scalable, secure, and systemic methodology for voting with collateralized Bitcoin on the Algorand blockchain. We launched a new web application to facilitate a DAO vote. You can read more about the Issue and options for the vote in our blog here: https://medium.com/@ChoiceCoin/choice-coin-bitcoin-choices-6218ee5993d7

We built Bitcoin Choices using the Algorand blockchain as a scaling solution. The software also leverages AlgoMint, which is a software for creating collateralized Bitcoin on Algorand. By collateralizing Bitcoin on Algorand, BTC transactions become faster and less expensive.

We then developed a voting infrastructure using React and the Algorand JavaScript-SDK to create a voting interface that allows users to connect their wallets and vote. The votes are then aggregated on the blockchain and recorded in real time. After the voting period concludes, we wrote a smart contract that reads all the voting data from the blockchain and returns any Bitcoin used for voting, plus a proportional reward from a pool.

One of the main challenges we ran into was the mathematics for voting and ensuring the software could adequately handle unit measurements in Satoshis, the smallest BTC unit. For reference, one Bitcoin is equal to 100,000,000.00 Satoshis and one Satoshi is equal to 0.00000001 BTC. But, calculating such small numbers to allow for one Satoshi to equal one vote and to coordinate those calculations with the Algorand blockchain was our key challenge in both front-end and back-end development.

• Brian Haney
• Samuel Tosin
• David Kazeem

SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4103448

Copyright Choice Coin 2022

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