EOS BlockSmith - position on giving dividends and paying for votes (eos.go checkmark #8)

EOS BlockSmith humbly submits our position on “giving dividends and paying for votes” to the community, in support of EOS.GO and their amazing efforts to help everyone understand who the BP candidates are.

At BlockSmith we are 100% committed to avoiding all conflicts of interest. As such we commit to never rewarding voters in any way, material or otherwise, beyond providing high quality and impartial service to the entire network.

We also believe that voters can be influenced with rewards in many ways, besides directly paying for votes, and we are committed to avoiding that as well. The following is a more specific list to help enumerate what we consider to be behaviors in-line with this pledge.

1. We will not pay for votes, provide dividends, airdrops, or any other form of compensation to any individual or organization in EOS, including anyone who votes for us.
2. We will not invest or donate block rewards, or our own capital, into any other organization in EOS as it may cause them to favor us for voting.
3. We will not provide proprietary infrastructure, bandwidth, ram, or other resources to specific groups in EOS as it may cause them to favor us for voting.
4. We will not organize with other Block Producers to “share votes”.
5. We will not attempt to influence our voters to vote for other specific Block Producers.
6. We will not provide priority service to anyone in EOS, including those who vote for us.
7. We will act impartially in the formation of our Blocks and will never favor transactions from any specific group, including those who vote for us.

There are many ways Block Producers can incentivise voters beyond directly paying them.  We hope the above list provides a set of examples.  More important than the specific list shown above, our intent is to not influence by rewarding voters directly or indirectly, beyond our role as an impartial producer of blocks.  If there are omissions in that list, which I’m sure there are, our intent is to avoid them as well.

We take Independence in Block Producers very seriously and will do everything in our power to avoid conflicts of interest, both real and perceived. In doing so, we have created a truly independent and impartial BP node that will provide fair and equitable service to everyone in EOS. That is our value proposition.