Another thought. Today on X, Adam Dean wrote:
The power isn’t the problem, abuse of it is.
https://twitter.com/adamKDean/status/1742179458315063602
And I kind of disagree with that. Even with only well-meaning and competent dReps, unrestricted accumulation of power could lead to a suboptimal state of the governance system.
If only a handful of dReps have the vast majority of voting power distributed among them, it becomes pointless for smaller dReps to even participate and for delegators to delegate to a dRep not part of this handful.
And I honestly don’t think that that is an obscure scenario. Just imagine that voters in general elections could give unlimited votes to any candidate of their choice. I really would expect that the few politicians who are known and popular through traditional and social media would get the enormous majority of votes and the other hundreds of representatives would be quite completely irrelevant. It has reasons that parliaments are designed to consist of equals with one vote each.
A couple of years ago, the German Pirate Party did some Liquid Democracy (LD) experiments. (They never became the decision system of the party because there was huge opposition due to various concerns – vote privacy etc.)
In a very short time, one man – a quite humble linguistics professor – became the super delegate who could basically decide all votes on his own … because people thought – rightfully – that he was nice, knowledgeable, and intelligent. And he didn’t campaign (and I think also not really wanted) that much power, let alone abuse it. But also, of course, didn’t have time to give all the hundreds of proposals in that system due diligence. (Small political parties are expensive and time-consuming hobbies, not a full-time job.)
And – by the way – that system was real Liquid Democracy. So, delegations could be given transitively to other delegates globally, for specific areas, or for single topics. And such delegation chains could be broken at any time by people just voting themselves without having to withdraw the delegation.
Side note: I’d expect LD advocates to be quite shocked that people call what is built here with CIP-1694/MVG an implementation of LD although it does not have transitive delegations at all and is, hence, missing one of the key features.
So, he often chose to give the author of the first in his view good proposal in a topic the delegation for that topic. Choosing a good impartial topic delegate who is not an author of one of the competing proposals would have probably been better, but arguably much too much effort for hundreds of topics. And that instantly gave all later counter proposals or improvement suggestions a huge disadvantage in opposition to the one chosen. Still, nobody in this whole setup was doing anything malicious, but just the design of the system made it much less promising to put work in alternatives.
And if you deemed a topic rather important and the proposal currently supported by such a transitive “super delegation” really bad, you had to campaign for the delegation chain to be broken. Which unnecessarily poses the risk to make the whole thing personal. Even if you purely argue with regards to content, it always has a taste of: “This delegate does a bad job! Abandon them!”
There are a lot of differences to the system we are building (or rather getting proposed from above?) at the moment. We do not have a concept of topics with competing proposals (although that might be a good idea, perhaps?), we just decide on rather technical issues, not on parts of a party platform, we do not have transitive delegations.
But the basic risk that very few people could get a lot of decision power is the same in my opinion and – without any bad intent – they can use it without (always) employing the necessary amount of due diligence, sometimes getting overwhelmed by their biases, or excluding alternatives very early, too early.
And some of the differences potentially make it worse. Not having transitivity and not having area and topic specific delegations gives the dReps global power that they cannot even delegate further. Incentivising everyone to delegate (see original post) encourages quick decision based on sympathy and popularity.
Maybe, this is all too late. I tried many times on different channels in the last months. And I’m still (see original post) very much disappointed that the discussion was never started with “How do we want a governance system to look like?” but with: “Hoskinson and IOG had another iNgEnIoUs idea and you are graciously invited to discuss some minor details.”
I don’t really expect a large catastrophe. Tweaking some parameters and deciding on some hard forks that people who know what they are doing have developed with (hopefully) enough feedback for months cannot do that much bad. We survived the founding entities and the founder. We will also survive dReps.
But if it is much less great and satisfying than expected, I reserve the right to say: “Told you so!”