Why complicate CIP-1694?

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.

The whale is more sophisticated and knowledgeable about risks and how to mitigate them than most, if not all, of the minnows. She is a whale precisely because she is sophisticated, intelligent, and successful.

Out of interest: What if Elon Musk became a member of the Cardano community, started investing in Ada, and started building tools and services? Would you seek to limit his voting power to be less than proportional to his Ada?

I’m not sure if being a whale equates to being smart as there are many ways wealth are acquired such as inheritance. But good for her/him if she/he knows how to manage risks, but we can all agree that hot wallets and saving keys digitally are risky.

If Elon Musks invest in ADA and the electoral college system is already in place, that only suggests one thing: Elon agrees to submit himself to the protocol.

You can, of course, do such scripting on air-gapped machines. The equation script solution = hot wallet is as wrong as no scripting = super-secure offline solution. I’d hope that most whales at least use hardware wallets, but I won’t necessarily believe it.

And even if you are too lazy for that, having them managed in a hand-baked script solution is already much less likely to be attacked than the standard wallet apps used by retail. Malware wouldn’t know, where to look for keys exactly, and 90% of attackers take the (far too) easy targets that are naïve enough to give their seed phrase to a half-convincing scam site.

If Elon Musk would enter ADA, I would leave as soon as possible. That guy does not qualify as a positive example for anything. And whatever society he decides to penetrate with his existence should just tax the shit out of him or completely disown him.

I’ve done basic scripting before with cardano-node, and i mean that thing is not fun.

In this case, the transfer of small amount of ada, to individually delegating them, and monitoring if your stake still has influence on a pool, and then redelegating if it’s not, plus you have to contend with 3000 other pools or 4000 or 5000. That’s exhausting to me at least. Because what, you can only control a certain number of pools, not all 3000, 4000, 5000.

If you want to meaningfully reduce their rewards (in the other “decentralisation” proposal) or give them the possibility to multiply their voting power (in this proposal), you are creating a huge incentive to do just that.

Although developer onboarding in Cardano is not optimal, there still are enough people who do not consider writing such a solution overly complicated.

You also don’t have to monitor all 3000+ pools for that. A single whale with something in the range of 100 million ADA won’t be able to single-handedly completely control the outcome of a vote, anyway. But your electoral college style system still gives them the possibility to control a much larger share of the votes than just voting power by ADA.

Yeah, it can definitely increase their voting power but not enormously. In your example it was only an increase of 0.6 for a whale holding 63M. And there is not that many 63 M whales, and since staking is dynamic, there is no guarantee that the 0.6 increase will secure a cip pass.

In your example for the popular system, 99M vs 97 M, there is no dynamism to this. The 99M will always win.

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They have 63 million / 196 million = 32.1 % of the ADA and, hence, of the voting power in pure vote by ADA.

Already in the non-optimised stake-pool-indirected, electoral college example, they control Pool 4 completely, i.e., 1.0 votes / 2.8 votes = 35.7 % of the total votes.

In the optimised example, they control Pools 2 to 5 completely, i.e., 1.8 votes / 2.8 votes = 64.3 % of the votes. Exactly doubled.

And that does not depend on the toy example, where it is a significant share of the total votes. And it also does not depend on being in the range of 60 million. As long as the whale has enough to find a pool where they can have 50% of the stake, they can always double their influence, even if they have only 2 million.

In a real-world example, a single whale will never have enough to completely control the vote result, but they can still (almost) double their influence, not enough to decide alone, but surely unfair.

The time when the snapshot for determining voting power is taken is known. They just have to make sure to have as close to 50% of the stake in all pools they are delegating to (with hosts of accounts) by that time. The small stakes of retail would need a quite unrealistic coordinated effort to move much just before that deadline.

The only unpleasancy could occur if two whales try to do that on the same pool and compete for getting 50% in it. Since it is unpleasant for both, they could just try to move to pools with no other whales (looking if there were large stake changes in the couple of days prior to the vote deadline).

Yes, and that could be considered good, the correct result.

If you consider it good, seems to depend on the question if the 99 or the 97 contain more whales (and on you being able to identify if there even are whales in there).

They have 63 million / 196 million = 32.1 % of the ADA and, hence, of the voting power in pure vote by ADA.

Already in the non-optimised stake-pool-indirected, electoral college example, they control Pool 4 completely, i.e., 1.0 votes / 2.8 votes = 35.7 % of the total votes.

In the optimised example, they control Pools 2 to 5 completely, i.e., 1.8 votes / 2.8 votes = 64.3 % of the votes. Exactly doubled.

And that does not depend on the toy example, where it is a significant share of the total votes. And it also does not depend on being in the range of 60 million. As long as the whale has enough to find a pool where they can have 50% of the stake, they can always double their influence, even if they have only 2 million.

If you are talking about subsets, these are the numbers. Now, think about these numbers for all 3000+ pools. You will win some subsets but not all 3000+, and at an increase of 0.6 votes, that’s minimal. Is it really worth to split your 63M into multiple 10000 ADA just to get 0.6 additional vote? That’s 6,300 wallets. You are getting an additional vote of 0.000095 per wallet only.

Now, Imagine how small would it be for smaller whales.

The only unpleasancy could occur if two whales try to do that on the same pool and compete for getting 50% in it. Since it is unpleasant for both, they could just try to move to pools with no other whales (looking if there were large stake changes in the couple of days prior to the vote deadline).

What happens if a whale had stayed there already even way before? You can’t see that by looking for large stake changes in the “couple” of days.

Yes, and that could be considered good, the correct result.

If you consider it good, seems to depend on the question if the 99 or the 97 contain more whales (and on you being able to identify if there even are whales in there).

But not if the 99M had already formed an alliance - the whale alliance. It’s like the senate, whoever controls the majority always wins.

Its almost like we need an academic paper on this…

Some background analysis https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.07188.pdf by Lazos and Kiayias…

Our work lays out a common foundation for assessing governance processes in blockchain systems and while it highlights shortcomings and deficiencies in currently deployed systems, it can also be a catalyst for improving these processes to the highest possible standard with appropriate trade-offs, something direly needed for blockchain platforms to operate effectively in the long term.

As an aside against their objective criteria Catalyst does not come out well. I rather hoped they might have come to a conclusion that would feed into CIP1694.

The evaluation framework should be applied though to assess candidates?

As previously in

you seem to not see that you just scaled all votes by dividing through saturation.

If all pools only get at most 1 vote if they are fully saturated, there can be at most 25 billion staked ADA / 70 million ADA saturation = 357 votes in total. 0.6 votes are a lot in that setting. They are in the same range than the millions of ADA votes of a total of billions of ADA votes that you found so scandalous to begin with.

If 0.6 of 357 votes are “minimal” then 63 million votes of 25 billion votes are also minimal and we can just stop talking about whales being a problem at all.

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… and they judge it much too favourable at least on the verifiability property. It is all “Trust us, bro!” up to now. We cannot independently verify the votes. We cannot even see them. Just the registration of voting keys is on the Cardano chain. Everything else is behind closed doors.

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OK, let me pick someone less controversial. How about DCSpark or Sebastian? Clearly he will have more Ada than anyone discussing this thread. He is successful and I think provides value to Cardano.

@jcamp, is it your intention to limit the voting power of whales like this?

Thinking a few more steps along: What are you going to achieve? If you were to succeed in making things unfair for these whales you seem to hate, what will they do? What if they figure that they are the ones creating all the value and decide to fork the chain to have a fair (in their eyes at least) version without your whale vote limiting “feature”?

Which version are you then going to join:

  1. The version with all the entrepreneurial whales creating stuff and doing things?
  2. Or the version with all the rent-seeking minnows debating about how they can limit the voting power of the bigger minnows?

It does feel like it. I am not sure if anyone who is more mathematically savvy is interested. Thanks for sharing the link, I will definitely have fun reading it!

That’s a good point, but the proposal provides more dynamism for all participants as well as risks and inconveniencies for those who want to game the system. We don’t have such dynamism in a popular referendum.

Again, I’d like to emphasize that splitting a big wallet into 63,000 small ones just to gain some 0.000095 additional vote per wallet, does not appear to be worth the risk and inconvenience, at least to me.

Also, I just realized that we do now have tools such as the one developed by Xerberus to track fund movements. If these tools mature, we may be able to use that to analyze wallet splitting and, therefore, whale movement and maybe even be used in the calculation of the wallet decentralization metric.

Just to put it out there, I am not a whale-hater. I am simply providing an alternative mechanism for governance that will give more empowerment to small investors. A society can only have an efficient government if it has a strong middleclass. Blockchain infra is no different.

If a blockchain is truly decentralized, the likelihood of chain splitting is non-existent - although at MAV 20, Cardano does not appear to be that decentralized.

Which brings me to my other point that we need a different mechanism to improve decentralization. I’ve outlined a proposal here.

I’m no math wizard and these calculations are doing my head in.

Is this simply not an argument a matter of identity, the question is do we fight for anonymity or do we fight for the truth of identity, be you round, square, or whatever shape you want to imagine!

KYC, or stop pretending

All Cardano Holders should be part of the Cardano Identity System

Atala PRISM

(https://atalaprism.io/)

PS. We need to think about Cardano as a Network State https://book.thenetworkstate.com/tns.pdf

Sorry didn’t mean to distract from your thread purpose…

I’m not sure which of my statements suggest that this proposal requires a KYC. I’d be happy to accommodate if you can point it out to me.

not you art all JC…

Small mention that triggered a stance I have hence the apology. Doing a great job of maintaining your position, if the math works, all the power to you.

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