Requiring a 50 BTC deposit (or whatever) would be another way to prevent Sybil attacks. Perhaps this could be an alternative to giving out your identity.
Another possibility would be to have one of several third-parties verify your identity and give you an anonymous "voting token" using blind signing.
Another possibility would be to have one of several third-parties verify your identity and give you an anonymous "voting token" using blind signing.
50 BTC (or whatever) deposit, tied up for a minimum of a year (don't want somebody putting down 1,000 BTC deposits the day before a vote, voting 20 times, then canceling their 20 sockpuppet memberships and getting their deposit back immediately) is an interesting idea.
Call me paranoid, but I don't see many third parties who I would trust to not get hacked and to properly identify anonymous people. I don't see that third parties would have a strong incentive to do a good job at that. And delegating that piece of really core functionality feels like the wrong way to go to me.
For the record: I think it would be great to come up with an easier way for people to remain anonymous but still be Foundation members. I say "easier" because I'd guess with enough effort you could use a (physical) mail forwarding service and an anonymous email service to sign up with a fake identity. I suppose the mail forwarding service is like an identity-checking service.
RE: one vote per bitcoin: there seems to be some notion that Foundation member will be voting on things like "should a change to the core protocol be rolled out to support XYZ."
Umm, no. Foundation members will be voting for (and lobbying) board members who will decide things like "should the bylaws be changed to allow anonymous memberships" or "how much Foundation budget should be dedicated to X and how much to Y." The number of bitcoins you own has nothing to do with those kinds of organizational decisions.
Technical changes will happen as they have for the last couple of years-- get rough consensus in the developer community then convince miners and merchants and users to upgrade.