Agreed @Marklaw,
I learned about logical fallacies by watching these informative and fun cartoons.
I learned about cognitive bias by watching this video. Just a few seconds on each topic conveys the idea.
I use this understanding frequently as I try to make sense of what I am experiencing for myself and what I am being told.
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This is exactly the kind of ‘direct democracy’ that MakerDAO started with and had for years, and they’ve just fought tooth-and-nail to try and figure out how to design and implement a better system, the result (for better or worse) is what they’ve dubbed ‘The Endgame’…
The approved proposals include Maker’s guiding principles called “Constitution,”[1] which was written by Maker founder Rune Christensen, and lay a new foundation for the protocol’s governance, development and investments of its reserves.
The move also restructures DAO’s governance by establishing new groups such as Constitutional Voter Committees (CVCs), Constitutional Delegates (CDs) and Constitutional Conservers (CCs).
–
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2023/03/27/lending-platform-makerdao-approves-constitution-moves-forward-with-endgame-plan/
Does that look familiar? That’s because Cardano has clearly learned from others’ mistakes* and are proposing we start-off with a system the likes of which others wish they’d had from the start, and are now trying their best to transition to…
* “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” – George Santayana
Messily, I might add, because they’re doing it by committee… An already imperfect, anemic committee (due to extremely low overall voter-participation) made-up of a small collective of die-hard ‘insiders’ who have been a part of the system for some time – many who can shout a lot louder than others who are more ‘independent’ and under-represented – some who, like co-founder Rune Christensen, can easily out-vote anyone else* – and all of whom have been embroiled in a cycle of “bicycle shedding”[2] the whole thing for quite awhile now, due in part to a lack of guiding principles (like you’ll find in a constitution) they could all rally behind…
* Because, of course, in a ‘direct democracy’ type of system, the only ‘check-and-balance’ you have is your reliance on the vast majority of potential voters actually actively participating, which clearly hasn’t happened and won’t happen if there aren’t proper incentives in place (insert shameless plug here for this topic: CIP-1694: I have a concern re: the current proposal for voting incentives)
If you don’t believe me, please go dive into the months/years of history over on their forums (https://forum.makerdao.com/c/governance) and you’ll see the other now-dead proposals and ideas that many people fought for – and many good, reasonable people quit over – not because they weren’t the best ideas (they may or may not have been) but because they simply couldn’t gain any traction in a system that was mostly directionless, had little-to-no “common ground” to stand on, and led by a few who had de-facto power due to the directly democratic nature of the system…
p.s. Because I’m a new account here, I can’t include more than 2 links in my post, so here are the links I’d like to include, as referenced in the text above:
[1] https://forum.makerdao.com/t/mip101-the-maker-constitution/19621
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
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I don’t see why restricting choice (ie not allow delegation) is undesirable. I think the onus is on you to prove the benefits of restriction, since you propose he more narrow version of governance.
If, in expectation, dReps make weakly better decisions (using whatever definition/perspective of the ADA stakeholder) than the ada holder, then dReps seem to be an improvement worthwhile.
It means we get larger set of opinions and perspectives, ie less centralisation of power - if you have followed DAO discussions and debates as it relates to onchain governance then you’ll know that THE MAIN problem of onchain governance is that it tends to become concentrated into the wealthy few (whales).
dReps represent a means for the small holders to have some form of voice to counteract these whales.
The cost of check out a few dReps versus fully considering various CIPs is massively in favour of getting a few dRep once a year or so (maybe read an annual report on what they’ve done).
Hi guys,
can I have your feedback on governance system i have created?
I call it open voting standard and the main purpose is to create onchain scalable governance.
All messages are casted in specific json schema object. The standard defines the schema.
First type of message is Question. In general it has title, text, voting session number of rounds, options, category, and encryption address.
Second type of message is Vote Cast, it has the reference to the tx id of the question, and weights for different options (numbers from 0 to 1000).
Third type of message is Encrypted Vote Cast. With ED22529 address we can encrypt using Curve25519XSalsa20Poly1305 mechanism and decrypt using private key questioner holds from the question.
Next type of message is Delegation. It is possible to do fractional delegation, so i can delegate to account A 100 points and account B 900 points, and it means account A has 10% of my voting power.
The delegation can be also categorized, so category IT can have different wisdom tree than category Legal. Btw the delegation persists through multiple voting and is always taken at the snapshot when the voting session ends. Each person can vote by himself and in that case he does not delegate in that specific voting session.
Next type is Trusted list management. Questioner can create list of trusted accounts. It might be for example KYCed accounts or accounts verified by the orb from World coin or whatever DAO decides.
Next type is the Result message. The actuall calculation is done offchain, and dao can give the encryption keys to auditors to calculate the results separately. When the results are met the dao gives final results and write the results to the blockchain.
The results are calculated in 6 different form for single voting all the time. It is Standard voting power or quadratic form, with combination of one token one vote, one account one vote, and one trusted list acocunt one vote.
So the DAO interprets the results, and if it has in constitution that for example for something in order to pass is required 50% of all voted tokens and 50% of all kyced accounts, they check if this has been met.
The open voting standard is managed by the VoteCoin DAO - https://www.vote-coin.com/ Btw it is implemented, working and open source.
We have even participated in the F10 catalyst to bring it to cardano.
From the discussion above i have noticed following points
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You do not need to solve the quora requirements for vote if you setup the delegations correctly. If everybody delegates to someone and they create circles it is highly possible that DAO will have very high quora voted all the time.
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Regarding concentration of power to whales, the only solution to this is to make the KYC and make the solution to do one person one vote in combination to tokens voting power.
Greetings @Scholtz,
Great work on your voting system!
Congratulations!
You may wish to reach out to the people at https://voteaire.io/ for possible collaboration.
I think you are more likely to be bitten by a shark that just won the lottery than see KYC adopted for Cardano governance. KYC is extremely difficult to administrate. It is very easy to cheat. And there are legitimate reasons for many of our community members to withhold their identities.
I believe quora requirements and power concentration problems can be solved without KYC.
I propose an anonymous jury system to decide all governance and funding proposals in jury trials.
The jury pool is made up of crypto-journalists that research and write on governance issues for the Cardano community.
While the journalists are anonymous, they are known by their body of journalistic works which are all signed with the same private key.
I call this anonymous reputation.
The anonymous juror could be an individual, a group of people, or and artificial intelligence.
There would be no way to know, but it doesn’t matter either.
That’s because one juror gets only one vote on the governance issue and the jurors are selected at random from the jury pool.
Quora requirements are always met and the power concentration problem is solved without KYC.
The details are found in Beemocracy under the section: Putting A Proposal On Trial
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That one point right there makes the concept of dReps a non-starter, IMO.
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There are at least two openings for corruption.
One is via a market for delegators to delegate ADA to the DReps.
The other is corruption of the DReps themselves.
There is already an automated market for buying and selling delegation on Catalyst proposals as seen in the following video which is queued up to the spot where it is explained what they are doing. Many may be shocked to know that this is happening already and that there is no reason the same scheme cannot be perpetuated against governance in CIP-1694. The way I see it, only thing that will protect our community from having the treasury emptied or the parameters hijacked as CIP-1694 stands now is the constitutional committee.
The perverse market for delegation to DReps is addressed in Beemocracy under the following heading:
prevent-buying-and-selling-of-delegation
As for keeping the DReps honest (BReps in the case of Beemocracy), that is covered under the following headings:
bee-democracy
putting-a-proposal-on-trial
This is summarized as follows: The difference between Beemocracy and CIP-1694 is that BReps are required to solicit for delegation on every governance proposal. The solicitation explains the BRep’s position and locks their vote. The solicitations also establish identity and reputation for the otherwise anonymous BReps. Furthermore the community must meet the threshold for delegation to the BReps solicitations and locked votes on the current issue before the BReps votes can be counted. If the threshold for delegation on the current issue is not met then the proposal goes to trial before jury of randomly selected BReps. While the BReps remain anonymous, they are known by their collection of solicitations on various governance issues which all have the same digital signature. So they are invested in their reputation even though they remain anonymous. Protecting their investment in reputation is their incentive not to sell their vote. As a final protection, the constitutional committee must agree the the verdict is constitutional.
3 Likes