bsips/bsip-0009-Benefit-Society.md

BSIP: 0001
Title: BSIP Purpose and Guidelines
Authors: Fabian Schuh <Fabian@BitShares.eu>
Status: Draft
Type: Informational
Created: 2015-12-16

Benefit Society on a Blockchain

This improvement would allow individuals to form benefit societies on a blockchain.

A benefit society, fraternal benefit society or fraternal benefit order is a society, an organization or a voluntary association formed to provide mutual aid, benefit, for instance insurance for relief from sundry difficulties.

The premise of this feature is to be an organizational tool for groups of individuals working toward a common cause. The benefit of implementing this on a blockchain is to enable the formation of of benefit societies that may be difficult or impossible to operate in the traditional manner.

This feature would not change any existing behavior on the BitShares blockchain and would only add new operations.

Society State

Field	Description
Creator	Account ID of the creator of this society. This account has permission to modify the properties of this society until the first membership account is funded and Karma has been issued. After Karma has been issued, the creator permissions are set to the top P membership accounts by total Karma vote.
P	The number of members who have joint control over the creator account.
Name	Used to identify the society. The name can be any UTF8 string up to 60 characters.
Description	Defines the high level purpose of the society
Decay Rate	Defines the rate at which karma in a society decays (% per day)
Karma Ratio	Defines the amount of karma each member earns per BTS of commitment
Vesting Period	Defines the rate in seconds at which Karma vests
URL	Defines a URL where more information about the society can be found
Total Karma	Tracks the total karma issued to all members of this society
Approval Threshold	The percent of karma voting required to approve a payment request
Total Approved Requests	The total amount of Karma that has been approved for donations, this number can be calculated by summing the requests
Total Payouts	Total BTS given to active requests.
Charity Percent	The percent of donations that may be given to charity requests
Active Charity Requests	The number of active charity requests that are allowed. The top N charity requests by Karma approval voting may receive donations from member's charity account.

Membership State

Field	Description
Membership ID	Unique Identifier for this Membership
Account ID	The BTS account which has control over this Membership
Society ID	The society this membership is a part of
Total BTS Given	Tracks the life-time total of how much BTS has flowed through this membership
Membership BTS	BTS held in reserve that may only be given to other members
Charity BTS	BTS held in reserve that may be given to charity or other members
Karma	Current Karma within this society

Request State

Field	Description
Membership ID	The society member making the request
Karma Committed	The total Karma being being used by this request
Total Karma For	The total amount of Karma voting to approve this request
Total Karma Against	The total amount of Karma voting against this request
Subject	An 80 character title for the request
Summary	A brief summary of the request
Details	A detailed descirption of the request
Total BTS Received	The total BTS that has been given to this request

New Operations

Create Society - This operation is similar to create asset. It defines a new society including a name, description, and any configurable parameters.

Join Society - This operation ties an existing BitShares account to a particular society and defines any relevant information associated with society membership. This information may include the user's real name, age, location, etc.

Commit Funds to Society - This operation will transfer BTS from an account to a society membership. It may be performed by any account. 1% of the BTS transferred will be paid to the BTS reserve pool, 2% of the BTS transfered will be allocated to the referral program, and 2% of the BTS transferred will be used to buy back a Fee Backed Asset dedicated to this feature. The society membership will earn Karma within the society proportional to the BTS contributed.

Request Payout from Soceity - This operation will create a payout request. A payout request includes Karma from the membership account requesting the payout and requires permission of the membership owner. The request includes a subject, summary, and detailed description explaining the justification.

Update Payout Request - This operation can be used to update mutable properties of an existing payout request.

Approve or Reject Payout Request - This operation is used to vote for or against paying out a particular request. Each member of a society can vote with a weight equal to the amount of karma the account has earned.

Update Membership Info - This operation is used to update mutable membership information such as nominating a proxy to vote on your behalf. This is designed to simplify the amount of voting the average member must worry about.

Fund Payout Request - This operation will transfer BTS held in the membership account reserve to an approved payout request.

Maitenance Operations

The following actions will be performed on a daily basis during a mainteanance interval block.

1. Tally all relevant votes
2. Update management account authority for each society
3. Update management account authority for the fee backed asset
4. Decay all Karma by the configured percentage