The Problem of Voting in Public Blockchains

Impact has innumerable forms.
Impact has innumerable forms.

I don’t particularly believe in the fairness or unfairness of having investors and developers having equal or proportional votes to make decisions on blockchains.

There may be investors with 1 or 10 million tokens, and developers who contribute 1 or 1 million lines or code.

Investors with 1 token and developers who contributed 1 line of code may have much better ideas and impactful contributions than the ones with millions.

There are many non-investor and non-developer participants in blockchains like node operators, community managers, miners, commentators, influencers, etc. who may also be weak or strong contributors.

Not only are these differences everywhere, but the intensity of participation and their influence changes all the time as their interest and time spent in a blockchain ecosystem varies overtime.

For all of the above, either having staker vote or one-to-one votes per participant are both flawed mechanisms.

I would say there is no mechanism that may fully capture the reality of the impact, stake, or participation (and whatever other variables there may be) of the participants, regardless of their nature.

The only mechanism that captures reality, which is not a mechanism per se, however imperfectly, is rough consensus, which is basically how Bitcoin and Ethereum Classic work now.


Code Is Law

Author: Donald McIntyre

Read about me here.