I would like to discuss the following blog entry:
"30 day cooldown time on newly powered up HP for governance voting.
The Hive governance system is made up of both witness voting and DHF voting. When additional new funds are powered up, their weight will NOT count towards governance voting for the following 30 days. This adds a healthy buffer period to any potential malicious coordinated takeover attempt which allows the community a chance to respond, and is an important yet reasonable safeguard to help prevent attacks via funds stored on exchanges without impacting funds in any way."
I do not know what the author has in mind, but I do not understand his view that coins are not disadvantaged if the voting right that is normally inherent to them is withdrawn for a certain period of time.
If one coin has a voting weight and the other one does not then this is a disadvantage, e.g. In the case of stock corporations, the preferred shares are provided with a minimum dividend and very often also with an additional dividend to compensate for the disadvantage that they have no voting rights.
But here an investor is told that he has only one disadvantage, namely no voting rights for 30 days, without any compensation - great thing!
Above all, from my point of view this is completely unnecessary, because the fact that an investor with 50% + 0.001 HIVE can actually determine the 30 top witnesses is only thanks to the electoral system that is widespread here, that ultimately follows the American electoral system with "The Winner take it all ".
If in a vote for a German parliament, a party has received 50% + 1 vote, it will hardly have 30 out of 30 seats.
So where is the problem and how can you solve it?
Now the problem lies in the combination of two peculiarities of the actual voting system:
- Everyone has 30 votes.
- Everyone can give each witness only one vote.
So it would be so easy to solve this problem in two ways:
- Reduction of witness voices.
- Possibility to accumulate votes.
Obviously, the top widnesses here are not interested in such reforms, since they could no longer be sure of staying in their top places.
Let's take a look at how these options are e.g. would affect the possibilities of a handler if we assume that 85% of the top 20 witnesses (so my information is - if this is wrong - please correct it) I have to agree to a handler so that it can be achieved.
Current:
- An investor with 50% + 0.001 HIVE chooses 30 witnesses and they occupy positions 1-30 even if they don't get any votes from anyone else.
With 1 witness vote per account:
Instead of 50% + 0.001 HIVE to be safely among the Top 30 Witnesses, suddenly 5% is enough to safely reach a place among the Top 20 Witnesses.
In this respect, a blocking minority would already exist with 20% of the votes (certainly 4 out of 20 witnesses from the top 20).
With accumulation of votes:
Here you can of course discuss all possible scenarios, but if you assume that you can give the 30 votes to 30 different witnesses or to only one witness all 30 votes or any combination between this, you will also find out that in this case 5% is enough for your Witness to be in the top 20 or 20% for a blocking minority of 4 witnesses.
So there are two good alternatives to not allow a new investor with 50% + 0.001 HIVE of capital to determine the top 20 (or top 30) witnesses alone.
In both cases, this would require more than 80% for 17 from 20 witnesses instead of 50% + 0.001 HIVE for 20 of 20 (or 30 of 30) witnesses - so why this regulation, which naturally disadvantages new investors?
I think the likelihood of a single person coming along to buy up 50% + 0.001 HP of the total supply would be very small with HIVE now because they'd have to drive up the price to all time highs to do that - expensive game to play?
Definitely agree that something has to change and 30 witness votes does seem excessive given that each vote has the same Hive Power attached to it. Would like to see that reduced to between 5-10, I think 1 might be a bit too much but if we're comparing it to "real world" electoral voting system then yes, you only have one vote but I don't think we can compare governance of a crypto platform to regular country governance.
The 30 day delay can easily be overcome just by waiting out 30 days if someone had malicious intent in any case?
"I think the likelihood of a single person coming along to buy up 50% + 0.001 HP of the total supply would be very small with HIVE now because they'd have to drive up the price to all time highs to do that - expensive game to play?"
You are right, but this 50% + 0.001 HIVE is only a theoretical worth. In the end it's clear that not everybody use his 30 witness votes, so in the end you should just have more hivepower than hivepower is assigned to the Top-1-Witness to determine all 30 witnesses. If you just want to have the force to decide yourself about all it will be even "only" necessary to have more hivepower than the witness at the 4th place, cause you need 17 from 20 witnesses for a hardfork, so you could even let the Top-3-witnesses at their place and power "only" up to reach 16 from 20.
Another point is that you must not buy the Hivepower, their exist also a lot of offerts where you can lease hivepower.
"Definitely agree that something has to change and 30 witness votes does seem excessive given that each vote has the same Hive Power attached to it. Would like to see that reduced to between 5-10, I think 1 might be a bit too much but if we're comparing it to "real world" electoral voting system then yes, you only have one vote but I don't think we can compare governance of a crypto platform to regular country governance."
To cut down the number of votes is just one possible way, another way is to allow cumulation of votes, so f.e. when I want only to vote for 5 witnesses why I cannot add 6 votes for everybody of this 5 witnesses ? So we can let the witness votes by 30 but break with the rule that you can use your 30 votes only for 30 different witnesses. Much user even don't know 30 witnesses, so some of them don't use all votes and some of them use a witness proxy, so why they cannot just vote the witnesses they know and add multiple votes to them ?
"The 30 day delay can easily be overcome just by waiting out 30 days if someone had malicious intent in any case?"
Based on past experiences the top witnesses will not sit and wait 30 days when they see that their is a new investor. They will do something in this 30 days. I think this is the idea behind this 30 days - to do activities to secure their position in this 30 days.
Good point, didn't think of that. So really there is still a risk of collusion on governance on HIVE based just by having more HP voting on witnesses in the top 17 positions - as long as they are above whoever is in 18th... makes sense then that the number of witness votes given should be reduced to less than half the number needed for consensus/super majority right?
I think that would be a better solution than allowing people to stack their votes in the other method you mentioned.
"Good point, didn't think of that. So really there is still a risk of collusion on governance on HIVE based just by having more HP voting on witnesses in the top 17 positions - as long as they are above whoever is in 18th... "
My understanding is a little bit different: If I understand correctly it is not important if you are at 1st or at 20th place, so you must not take place 1-17 - it would be also ok (or the same) to take place 4-20.
"makes sense then that the number of witness votes given should be reduced to less than half the number needed for consensus/super majority right?"
If you take one account than it would be enough to reduce it to 16, but you should consider the possibility to open more than one account and distribute your hive-power to more than one account. So f.e. (by 16 votes) you can add 3.125% to 17 accounts = 53.125%, if now all accounts vote 16/17 witnesses every witness-account has enough hivepower to take place in top 20.
So the safest way is to let everybody only 1 witness vote OR allow everybody to stack all votes to one account.
A investor would under this circumstances need more than 80% of existing Hivepower if he want to reach 17 from 20 top-20-witnesses for sure.
Yes agree with this now I've understood the reasons a bit better - thanks.
Have you presented this or had a discussion about it in the Hive Developers community?
"Have you presented this or had a discussion about it in the Hive Developers community?"
No - to be honest I even don't know where I can found them.
Well, there is a community called Hive Governance which you will definitely want to join and present your ideas to - here you go:
https://peakd.com/c/hive-111111/created
Not to mention they'd get forked out if it threatened the chain :D lolz
propably - because of this the 30 days I think.
Ha! No comment squire 😃
1 vote I don't think would do it. People barely use the 30 they have as it is. By reducing the total number altogether, it will force people to be more selective and they would have to choose. Just like politics - you ultimately have to vote on certain ones on the ballot. You won't see 30 candidates for Governor or President. But you can write in the 1 you want. Good argument you present tho.
Thank you for your comment.
For me are both options ok - to reduce vote or to let it by 30 but allow stacking of votes.
It's as you told: Much people won't use the 30 votes if they must really vote for 30 different witnesses.