Then you should understand where is the logic failure in your explanation.
Think of this again:
It does not matter if he splits to 3 SPOs (who want to vote to the same) or just put it into one SPO (who wants the same vote) the influence will be exactly the same.
It was a failure of communication. The phrase “0.31x3 = 0.94 vote only” meaning of his 34M ADA he is only able to muster less than 1 vote instead of a massive 34M votes.
But yeah, I did not see the possibility that you saw. The mechanism still does not guarantee a whale any massive influence.
Those 270 are just the majority. Of course, a vote on an action in CIP-1694 would also have to get a majority. And that’s also not the main problem with the system. The main problem is the majoritarian system below, where all votes that did not get the majority in a state (or in a constituency in the case of parliament elections) are effectively discarded.
Your system does not ensure at all that the undemocratic consequences of winner-takes-all harm whales. It could just as well harm the small fish, maybe even more.
Yes, we don’t have authorities shaping the constituencies. So, real gerrymandering is not possible.
Something very similar is possible. And it does not even need to be an SPO. A whale could distribute its stake among a lot of small pools, where it is in each case just enough to have a majority among the delegators to that pool. Your system says that the pool then votes with its whole delegated stake the way the whale wants. They get the additional voting power of the other delegators losing to them for free.
If I where a whale, I would specifically choose pools whose operators were very vocal on the other side than me – assuming that their usual delgators also are – to raise the chances that I am neutralising as much as possible of the opposition with this method.
Those 270 are just the majority. Of course, a vote on an action in CIP-1694 would also have to get a majority. And that’s also not the main problem with the system. The main problem is the majoritarian system below, where all votes that did not get the majority in a state (or in a constituency in the case of parliament elections) are effectively discarded.
The problem with the popular vote is we don’t really have a popular vote since the influence of each unique vote is proportional to how much ADA the vote holds. We’ve seen many type of attacks in the Catalyst and in other blockchains exploiting the weaknesses of this “popular” referendum. The electoral vote appears to tamper that influence and might be more suited for a blockchain infrastructure.
Your system does not ensure at all that the undemocratic consequences of winner-takes-all harm whales. It could just as well harm the small fish, maybe even more.
Undemocratic consequences…such as? Popular vote works well if either you KYC or you have a decentralized identity solution.
A whale could distribute its stake among a lot of small pools, where it is in each case just enough to have a majority among the delegators to that pool. Your system says that the pool then votes with its whole delegated stake the way the whale wants. They get the additional voting power of the other delegators losing to them for free.
Yes, but remember that a pool vote is proportional to its delegation. You get 1 vote only if the pool you are in is fully saturated. When you delegate to small pools, the power of your vote also decreases. There is some influence but very minor compared to when you use a popular vote. Imagine a whale getting only 1 vote vs millions of votes (because he holds millions of ada).
If I where a whale, I would specifically choose pools whose operators were very vocal on the other side than me – assuming that their usual delgators also are – to raise the chances that I am neutralising as much as possible of the opposition with this method.
Well, just like any system there will be exploits, but it appears that under an electoral college system, a whale may have little influence to the outcome in comparison to the usual popular referendum.
The ones winner-takes-all systems are widely criticised for for decades? That your vote is probably always for the bin if you are a Republican in San Francisco or New York or if you are a Democrat in rural Texas?
On the one hand, one might argue that voting power by ADA, by skin in the game is a good thing, that there is no reason why someone with just a couple of ADA should have the same power as someone who has the risk of losing value on millions of ADA, that it would be too easy for malevolent actors to just buy into having voting rights on Cardano with 10 ADA.
On the other hand, yes, if you want to have something in the direction of “one person, one vote”, you need identity. And KYC or digital identities is not even enough. It’s ridiculously easy to create hundreds of digital identities and still possible to KYC lots of accounts. You need to somehow ensure that one person can only activate one voting account, you need uniqueness, you need enough information to rule out multiple registrations per person. And that is a lot of information.
One person, one vote is probably not possible in a decentralised manner at all.
It’ just a constant factor of 1/saturation. It doesn’t matter at all if you say all pools have as many votes as ADA delegated to them (millions each) or if you say they all have delegated ADA divided by saturation (at most one each).
Voters with smaller bags also only get an even more tiny fraction of one vote in your system and are, of course, also affected by the pool they are voting in only getting a fractional vote if it is not saturated, but they at least have hundreds or thousands (just not millions like the whales) of votes in a direct vote by ADA.
Simplified example:
Popular vote by ADA would be: 99 million yes, 97 million no
Yes wins with 50.5 % of the votes.
Now, your “pool electoral college” is used with 5 pools:
Pool 1: 50 million yes, 20 million no, 70 million of 70 million saturation, 1,0 votes yes
Pool 2: 26 million yes, 2 million no, 28 million of 70 million saturation, 0.4 votes yes
Pool 3: 12 million yes, 2 million no, 14 million of 70 million saturation, 0.2 votes yes
Pool 4: 65 million no, 5 million yes, 70 million of 70 million saturation, 1.0 votes no
Pool 5: 8 million no, 6 million yes, 14 million of 70 million saturation, 0.2 votes no
Yes wins with 1.6 against 1.2 (57.1 %) of the votes.
This distribution makes the Yes win much clearer than it really is.
But 63 million of the no in Pool 4 are a whale and that whale is smart. They redistribute their stake so that they have a majority in Pools 2 to 5 (28 million to Pool 2, 14 million to Pool 3, 7 million stay in Pool 4, 14 million to Pool 5).
And that strategy they can even do without knowing or guessing how the other delegators will vote, because they then have 50% themselves in all those pools.
Pool 1: 50 million yes, 20 million no, 70 million of 70 million saturation, 1,0 votes yes
Pool 2: 30 million no (28 from whale), 26 million yes, 56 million of 70 million saturation, 0.8 votes no
Pool 3: 16 million no (14 from whale), 12 million yes, 28 million of 70 million saturation, 0.4 votes no
Pool 4: 9 million no (7 from whale), 5 million yes, 14 million of 70 million saturation, 0.2 votes no
Pool 5: 22 million no (14 from whale), 6 million yes, 28 million of 70 million saturation, 0.4 votes no
Now, no wins with 1.8 against 1.0 (64.3 %) of the votes.
Yep, the pool the whale was originally delegated to went from 1.0 voting weight down to 0.2, but securing (without doubt) the majority in three other pools more than compensated that.
A single whale (with 32.1 % of the total ADA in this toy example) had the possibility to control the voting of 4 of our 5 pools and swing the vote.
I will only answer your math argument because the discourse is getting convoluted.
What you have is a good point.
Now imagine that, like the whale, retails are also smart and already KNOW that when a pool is 50% whale, that pool is CENTRALIZED and that their vote is irrelevant. So, they find someplace else that is more DECENTRALIZED. That leaves the pool where the whale is with lower vote count than he expected. There is a dynamic here - a game theory - just like how the consensus mechanism (although flawed) was designed. In a popular vote, your power is only dependent on how much ADA you hold. Nothing else.
Now we can argue that retail, being a representative of a population, only really have an average IQ which brings me to my other idea (read it here) that pool reward, block production, and now voting power, should be proportional to how decentralized the pool is.
There is probably already an impossibility proof for this published somewhere… Nevertheless:
I will contend that it is impossible to develop some game theory mechanism that distributes voting power disproportionately to small holders, in the setting where you are unable to prove the identity of every voting wallet.
Are you suggesting that Cardano KYC every wallet in order to vote? If not then whales will just split their wallets in the most optimal way possible to maximise their voting power in order to overcome any system design that seeks to somehow reduce their voting power. Furthermore, whales are very likely to be more sophisticated at doing so than the average small holder.
All this cardano-whale bashing is getting too much. No wonder he closed his twitter account. Sorry - bad joke.
I will contend that it is impossible to develop some game theory mechanism that distributes voting power disproportionately to small holders, in the setting where you are unable to prove the identity of every voting wallet.
Game theory model can be developed for any system where there are competing players. I don’t think the game theory provided any exemptions, and I don’t see how the proposed voting system within a blockchain infra is exempted. Also, just like the consensus mechanism, the voting game theory model need not know your identity. Although, I have to admit I am not a mathematician, but I’d like to believe I am decent at math.
Are you suggesting that Cardano KYC every wallet in order to vote?
Not really. I mentioned KYC in relation to the popular referendum.
If not then whales will just split their wallets in the most optimal way possible to maximise their voting power in order to overcome any system design that seeks to somehow reduce their voting power. Furthermore, whales are very likely to be more sophisticated at doing so than the average small holder.
Empowering decentralized pools like my proposed mechanism that I described here solves this. Why? Because it is highly likely that in a decentralized pool, there are more small investors than there are more whales. Therefore, the pool vote stems from delegator consensus rather than from big player influence.
All this cardano-whale bashing is getting too much. No wonder he closed his twitter account. Sorry - bad joke.
That was not too bad actually. LOL.
The problem is that there is no way to tell the difference between a million small investors and a whale that has split his wallet into a million “small investor” wallets.
If the whale splits his wallets such that for each wallet delegated to a pool has a holding of < 50% of the pool holding, then he dilutes his influence over each pool. If it is >50%, then pool decentralization metric decreases and small investors leaves the pool, decreasing the pool’s vote count.
Think of the whale as a million small investors. There is no difference unless you somehow KYC every wallet so that you can tell which ones the whale controls.
And, by the way, the whale is likely to be more sophisticated so he will split his wallets in the most optimal way and stake the most optimal way to maximise his voting power.
So, just to make my previous argument clearer, I’d use some examples:
if the whale delegates his 20M to a pool with already 20M stake, the pool decentralization will decrease - which now means low reward for the pool. This makes the small investors leave the pool and, therefore, decreasing the pool vote count. So, whenever a pool has a wallet that holds 50% of the total stake, its decentralization metric decreases.
If the whale splits his 20 M into 5M each split and delegate them to pools that already have 20M stake, then his influence in these pools are low. He is not going to be able to control the pools. If he delegates them to pools with already 5M stake, then we are back to example 1.
There is no need to KYC. It’s the decrease in the decentralization metric (example 1) or decrease in influence (example 2) that minimizes the impact of a whale.
Just to complicate things a bit more to illustrate more absurdity: A so called “whale” could be holding Ada in one wallet on behalf of a million individual people. Eg. Family trusts, unit trusts, business trusts. So even if it is one wallet, you still don’t know how many people it represents. Unless, of course, you KYC everyone involved…
Why do you so vehemently seek to invent a perpetual motion machine in order to deprive this whale of her just voting power? If she is treated unfairly, she will take her money and invest it in a more fair minded community. Wouldn’t it be smarter to treat the whale you refer to fairly? And furthermore, seek other successful whales like her to also come and invest in the community?
Just to complicate things a bit more to illustrate more absurdity: A so called “whale” could be holding Ada in one wallet on behalf of a million individual people. Eg. Family trusts, unit trusts, business trusts. So even if it is one wallet, you still don’t know how many people it represents. Unless, of course, you KYC everyone involved…
This would be an internal agreement and the parties should know the implications and consequences of this agreement. That’s on them and not on the protocol.
Why do you so vehemently seek to invent a perpetual motion machine in order to deprive this whale of her just voting power? If she is treated unfairly, she will take her money and invest it in a more fair minded community. Wouldn’t it be smarter to treat the whale you refer to fairly? And furthermore, seek other successful whales like her to also come and invest in the community?
Imagine this scenario: two fully saturated pools, one pool belongs to a whale (68 M ADA), the other pool is composed of small investors with 1000 ADA each. The majority of these small investors are honest.
Now, imagine that there is a CIP that is harmful and benefits only the whale and a few other small investors. In a popular referendum the whale will easily get the CIP passed (68M plus some from small investors is more than 50%, yes vote wins).
However, in an electoral college system, the whale only gets one “yes” vote while the other pool gets one “no” vote. The CIP cannot pass.
Look, I think we are going around in circles.
And guess what: All of those small investors are actually the whale because she split her wallet and delegated to that pool a long time ago. What, you didn’t know that all those separate wallets were actually the whale?
Sorry but it does not make sense that a single whale will split his holding into wallets with 1000 ADA and delegate to the same pool 
If you try to limit their rewards or voting power otherwise (which they obviously would know, since we won’t and can’t do things secretly here, do we?), it makes total sense for the whale to split up and pretend to be a swarm of herrings to outrun your attempts to punish them.
Ah, I see the point. It makes sense in the 2-pool scenario; but with 3000 pools, the whale is only going to get 1 pool vote if he is going to attempt a fake “decentralization” in one pool.
Also, how convenient would it be to split 68 M stake into wallets with 1000 ADA. Or even 10,000 ADA? Some might attempt but I doubt many whales would do it.
Which brings us back to:
Through your system, rather than limiting the voting power of whales (which I think is impossible without KYC/identity/uniquesness of identity) you allow them to double their voting power by securing the majority in small pools and getting the voting power of the other delegators of those pools for free.
Your rebuttal
doesn’t work anymore if the whale pretends to be lots of accounts due to the general hostile climate towards whales. The other delegators cannot see anymore that someone already has secured the majority in “their” pool.
Plus: The day of the snapshot has to be known. You cannot keep such things secret in a decentralised system. Everybody knows. The whale can coordinate their huge amount of ADA quite well on that day, while the small accounts would have to try to coordinate many individuals to meaningfully counter such methods (if they can even notice it, see above).
You do know that such things can be scripted quite well?
The harsher you try to limit whale power, the more incentive you create to do it.
Ah, yes you can do scripting. Again, the question is how convenient would that be given that you are more likely putting your funds on hot wallets, and manage your keys digitally which will make them prone to attacks.
The point here is that, whatever the whale does to game the system is accompanied by risks. He might just as well play it safe.