Now that we are in Cardano’s Voltaire era; governance is top of the agenda, it would be really nice to be able to hold ballots where each community member gets an equal vote - true democracy requires it. Currently all voting is stake-weighted - ie. 1 ADA = 1 vote - I believe it was a mistake to extend stake-weighted voting outside of its original scope within consensus mechanisms - it enables a small group of wealthy stakeholders to manipulate every vote to their liking, and these rich stakeholders barely overlap with the people most qualified to be making technical and philosophical decisions about the future of the chain - many of the people who are the best qualified, are risk-adverse developers who operate almost entirely on testnet, and have only a few thousand Ada in their mainnet wallet. It’s incredibly important for the future direction of Cardano that these these people have a fair vote and it’s not just completely obliterated by even one whale vote, as it would be now.
I therefore offer a technical solution which allows us to approach the goal of 1 person = 1 vote in a decentralized manner - it does not rely on a centralized authority of any form, and does not require KYC.
This CIP defines a mechanism whereby any member of the community can publicly vouch for the authenticity of a wallet by submitting an “affirmation” transaction, it also provides a mechanism to revoke such an affirmation, if, for example a wallet becomes compromised, or its owner turns out to be a charlatan. It is consequently possible to observe the current UTxO set and draw an “Affirmation Graph”, a multidigraph representing the trust relationships between wallets - we can then use an algorithm to assign trust rankings and decide whether or not to trust an unknown wallet.
For full implementation details please read the CIP here:
I think this has good potential as a CIP (pending a more schematically written Specification, which is currently quite narrative, and perhaps a generalisation of this method if it derives exclusively from the provided smart contract) and also that it would well support the Governance effort as an analytical process.