How does Cardano governance become less dependent on centralized wealth?

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Cardano has governance so we can modify the cardano protocol over time in a decentralized way. I understand that. But what I don’t understand is how this will be sustainable in the long term if it remains a plutocracy, where votes to dReps are based on your wealth.

Even though cardano remains relatively decentralized compared to most other chains in terms of wealth distribution, it is still very centralized compared to actual governments (https://cexplorer.io/wealth).

My question is, how does cardano evolve to become less centralized in its decision making in the long term?

You can submit your own ideas as to how or anything official from the roadmap because I am unsure. Thanks!

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I’m hoping with Midnight and DIDS we will be able to change this to one DID one vote where DRep voting power is counted by delegated DIDs instead of $ADA.

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Won’t work (for a quite long foreseeable future). Anyone can create an arbitrary number of DIDs. A DID is basically just a public key registered according to some standard (on a blockchain or otherwise).

You could either say that you don’t mean standard DIDs, but some proprietary variant where isssuing a DID is permissioned, controlled by a centralised entity, or you mean a DID combined with some verifiable credential about the holder of the DID.

But on the one hand, proving human identities to some “DID” or VC issuer will for quite some time exclude a lot of people who do not have passports or ID cards or whose country is not yet supported by those issuers. All issuers in that strange “self-sovereign identity” space just use classic KYC procedures to do that up to now, and those rely on people having government identities and on the issuer having the expertise to verify such a government identity for the country of the user.

On the other hand, ensuring that such a “DID” or DID plus VC is unique (which you want for voting applications) is hard. Either we rely on one issuer for the whole world or on a network of issuers, but in any case they would need a central database of all people who want to vote in Cardano governance.

And there is no obvious set of attributes that uniquely identifies a human being. “Jane D. Smith, née Miller” might very well have documents proving her identity as “Jane D. Smith”, “Jane Smith”, “Jane D. Miller”, and “Jane Miller”. On the other hand, you might have more than one “Satō Hiroshi, born 1988-08-08 in Tokyo” and you won’t want to say to one of them “Nah, you are already registered for voting.” because another one already has. And this is all still made worse if you – for privacy reasons – don’t want to store, e.g., names and dates and places of birth in a database, but only a hash of them. But such hashes are constructed to be totally different for small variations – leaving out a middle name, slight spelling variations, document with a date of birth only up to month or off by one day, old or alternative name for place of birth, …

Nation states can alleviate these problems by either having reliable enough registries of their citizens (like most European countries) or at least having the possibility to cross check their voter registrations and believably threaten attempted frauds with relevant penalties. They should be mostly okay (contrary to the beliefs of some US nutjobs). Rebuilding something similar independent of nation states, world-wide, on a blockchain, with users crazy opposed to anything that smells like centralisation or an authority is nigh impossible.

Worldcoin tries it with biometric markers. Apart from the unbelievably dystopian vibe of their strange orbs, this would also rely on a mind-boggling logistics to distribute those orbs so that everybody on the world can access one with a reasonable (for them) amount of effort and on a centralised control structure to ensure that all these orbs are built to the same specifications and untampered with.

On the third hand, as long as Cardano is quite niche and only a tiny fraction of the world will even be interested in participating, you can probably quite easily pay a few hundred people a couple of bucks to use their totally valid and totally unique identity to vote in Cardano governance.

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We’ll get there eventually. One step at a time.

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I think one possible solution could be social verification, where you use family/friends/coworkers/whoever to verify you.

Obviously, this would only work if Cardano was big enough in scale, but maybe you have listed people (other DIDs) who can verify your identity and a subset of them must verify it for voting and decision making.

Hell this process could even work for storing seed phrases without having to remember them, by having your friends/family each store pieces of it as a recovery mechanism. I know Ethereum has Argent for this, could be cool to have something like that on Cardano.

I just think Cardano governance will need to use DIDs at some point if it reaches a certain scale since wealth is extremely concentrated on the chain.

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You might be on to something. I haven’t looked into Argent; but what you describe, as far as the seed phrases, is being done on multiple hardware wallets. Although, I am not sure how we could verify anyone is who they claim to be. We would need a service like a notary or something a little more secure than current online KYC practices. We could get a DID if we do all that.

Maybe, in the future everyone will have a DNA sample taken at birth and given their DID along with their digital birth certificate.

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The governance thing is kinda new so we don’t know what is going to actually happen in practice until more time passes, but we do have probably the best system of checks and balances out there.

However, let’s consider a worst case senario, a centralized entity like Blackrock/Vanguard is able to monopolize the vote and has taken Cardano in the wrong direction. To do that they would need to own the majority of ADA and nodes, which would mean less than half who believed in Cardano’s original ideology would be left on Cardano. But if that were the case, the people who do believe could possibly fork or start another Cardano based blockchain where projects could simply migrate.

I think the way to prevent this from happening and to further decentralize Cardano’s voting power is to create and vote on proposals for projects where the majority profits go back into the Cardano treasury instead of project owners pockets. This may seem counter-intuitive, but I believe this will attract projects that are willing to give back to the community instead of taking from it. Thereby, making it increasingly difficult for a central entity to take over.

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This is practically a question I have been contemplating for a long time now. I draw my experiences from the project catalyst voting system, where 1ADA ,1 Vote has been practiced over 12 funding rounds. It is clear that proposals affiliated with guys/entities with deep pockets or strong connections with ADA millionaires always get funded because they easily beat the threshold. It is usually not necessarily because they are able to put together a compelling proposal but they’ve got the means to get whatever they propose funded. For instance, if a team has a voting power of ADA10m and has a network of ADA millionaires as their circle, how would their “trash” not be funded? Essentially why a lot of funded projects who took huge sums have still not been able to complete and launch for real world use.

Honestly, I think the solution to the centralised state of voting would be that we embrace the common principle that is being used by all nations/governments. 1 verified DRep ID = 1 vote (Regardless of stake). This method will level the grounds against centralisation of votes in the sense that no single DRep will be able to steer the direction of Cardano simply because their stake is huge. Rather we can use the stake size to proportionally determine rewards for DReps to keep them motivated to engage in diligent practices.

Imagine if each DRep, regardless of their stake size, knows that their voice would equally be heard if they put in the work.

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i agree but it a bit hard

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This has been my biggest concern with Cardano governance since CIP-1694 was published - when voting is weighted by stake, what you have is a plutocracy, not a democracy.

I’ve engaged with various discussions around how you might achieve “one person = one vote” - KYC is ruled out, on the basis that it is not decentralized, and it excludes operators who cannot or will not complete KYC for whatever reason.

It occurred to me that it’s relatively easy to identify who is a real person on social media - how do you do it? by looking at a person’s public friend/follower list. If a user is followed by people you trust, then they are likely a legitimate source. You are observing the social graph, and using that to make a judgement about the trustworthiness of a source.

So if we had a way to establish a social graph within the blockchain, we would be able to make these same kinds of judgement about which wallets are backed by valid users, and which are simply bots.

I’ve therefore defined a technical solution which allows users of the blockchain to “vouch for” a wallet and publicly say that they support that wallet as a valid user. It is then possible to interrogate that social graph and determine the trustworthiness of a particular wallet in a systematic way. I’ve defined this in a CIP, and created a forum post for discussion here:

Please check this out and add any feedback you may have.

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