Alright, guys, I was hoping it wouldn’t turn into another one of these cases but it did. Since it seems the thread is being shared around the Firo community with the image about Reuben, I want this to be clear for anyone who may be showing up to post here about it.
THIS thread is about BUILDING A VOTING SYSTEM.
Anything to do with BUILDING A VOTING SYSTEM is acceptable. Getting off track/off-topic is understandable in some instances. Originally I ignored it since it seemed like it was a one-off that did not get much traction, but what I will not tolerate is people coming in here to hijack the thread to Lord knows where and for God knows what - and that includes, but not limited to, just posting in here expressing a like or dislike of Reuben.
On that same note: please keep civility and respect in the dialogue on this forum. I get that such topics can get under our skins from time to time, but nothing is achieved if we do not respectfully discuss and listen to each other. (Not that I am suggesting anyone has done otherwise - simply putting out a reminder.)
Only MN voting is not a good idea imo, alienation of any community member from participation is a bad route. Increased centralization increases the potential influence of self-interest to the detriment of the project, plain and simple. Imo, inclusivity is important to fostering a growing and thriving community, and more feedback and perspective would hopefully help realize Firo’s maximal potential.
But… I do agree with the sentiment, which I think is sort of where the MN only folks are coming from, that maybe there should be some sort of weighing or tiers as to how much voting power one has based on their role / contribution / investment in the project. Maybe this is essentially how quadratic voting will play out, or maybe a weighing + quadratic voting is the way.
Regardless, there’s a balance in here somewhere, we can find it.
The more I think about this, the more I realize that greater inclusivity comes with more variables, which may open up more opportunity for exploitation.
How to build a voting system is a very complicated question when you really dig into it.
I agree with some of the things you say but i have to say i strongly disagree about
“Performance speaks for itself” part and blaming the price/performance of Firo on @Reuben
Privacy coins in general have not fare well after the crash. Look at PivX, Grin, Beam and many other that did not have a big investors.
I personally think @Reuben and team doing amazing work with the small budget they have. If you or anyone think they can run the team in a better way they can step up and help. I dont think anyone is stopping that right?
Also as @nrsimha put it so well, give example of the wrong decisions and what you would have done differently.
Also look at the many accomplishments like rebrand that was badly needed, new logos, chainlock, MTP, continuous marketing, DEX etc etc…
What should We do?
4 & 5: What happens if many MN owners dont bother voting?
It would be good if there were a intcentive to vote, maybe a reward from a specific pool?
Also i see a problem with this whole idea that only community comes up with major decisions.
Most people i would say are not even technical enough to know what the needs of the chain is.
I bet most dont even know what tail emission is or would come up with the idea.
The team / Reuben should have a big say in what goes into development. He has a good track reckord of doing good work so i dont see a need to change that. But ofc its good if community can also contribute with good ideas.
@reuben
Who voted to double dump output Firo in bear market times?
The community only voted for the percentage ratio, but did not vote for double output.
In a bear market, doubling output can cause prices to enter a death spiral into $0.5 range.
Output has not been doubled. Block times have been reduced and rewards have been reduced accordingly meaning same emission schedule. I know there’s been a misconception in the Chinese community due to FUDDers like yourself who don’t read the announcement and which has been explained numerous times in other threads including ones you’re a part of.
We understand there is a lot of misunderstanding on the recent hard fork and block reward division. There is no acceleration of emission. Before the fork it was 12.5 FIRO every 5 minutes, after the hard fork it is 6.25 FIRO every 2.5 minutes.
I respectfully disagree to this proposal. The reason being is that is centralises the voting on the project too key holders of large amounts of Firo.
This would essentially steer the project in the direction of what large holders want which would be more like shareholders of a business with selective voting rights rather than a decentralised cryptocurrency. Too ensure even the small holders voice can be heard, a one coin one vote system would probably be the way to go as then all holders of the coins get a chance to voice their opinion.
Wallet based voting
All “active” Wallet nodes get to vote on issues, with a Firo weighted vote of your choice.
Definition of Active would need to be defined (peers, transactions, uptime, increasing balance,etc.)
If your passionate about an issue you pay more Firo to the Dev pool for another vote.
Eg. A wallet node gets a voting token for a month >90 uptime a balance greater than 100 and increasing by 10 per month. And/Or you can purchase a token for 10 Firo
With Notifications and voting via the wallet interface.
UTXO based chains can’t do ‘wallet’ based. There is no way to tie different addresses and balances unless you have the master seed. This is part of the design of a privacy chain.
Unlike ‘account’ based like in Ethereum which is easily gamed anyway since you can always create more wallet addresses.
Ethereum type of blockchains because of their lack of privacy can track usage and interactions with various protocols and therefore is a great ‘airdrop’ mechanism and also voting mechanism in some cases. We can’t do that as a privacy chain.
Thanks, Reuben for the response.
So just to clarify there is no way to do application based eligibility to vote and broadcast anonymous result, vote and messages on the chain?
Yeah, digital identity is a whole kettle of fish on its own and there isn’t really a perfect way especially if we don’t want people to KYC.
Now it is in our plans to build a Firo voting system but we’re focusing on Spark right now. One of the issues is not so much the cryptography on how to do it, we know how to do it with Aura which is our work but how do you determine eligibility to vote.
There is no perfect way, even if people were okay with KYC, people would still question whether they have phantom voters or bought KYC. The best way I have seen people approximate it is to tie it to active digital identities that people already use such as forum accounts combined with Github/other socials. We can also potentially add a small Firo holding component.
Then again, if you take a look at the last poll we held on here which was designed to be inclusive and only required forum trust level 1 or just apply to an Admin, you have miners who said they weren’t included in the process (which isn’t true as they were the ones we reached out to especially) and some masternode holders were angry at us too saying we allowed people with no stake in Firo to vote. There were some who also said that well this shouldn’t be put to the community to vote at all and that these things should never change or that core team should decide which also have obvious ways to criticize. There were some who said they can’t be expected to keep updated on news, well as a community member stated very succintly, “Elections are won by those who show up” and let’s face it, this is the truth. Democracy and elections only work with a sufficiently educated and engaged voter base.
Cryptographic systems only solve part of the puzzle in providing anonymity, verifiability and minimal trust in the election authorities. But the bigger social questions of who should decide what and how do you determine identity are tougher and more complex questions. Implementing Aura in existing voting systems where this is already determined such as company decision making or even elections where you know who is voting (shareholders or citizens). Right now we can’t even agree who are the ‘citizens’ of Firo and how they should be weighted and seeing the feedback in the last thread, I doubt that we have the maturity as a community to do this correctly.
Yet somehow people find ‘coin voting’ as more legitimate and accepted without realizing how bad it is.
I linked Vitalik’s great post on this in previous threads and will link it here again which illustrates governance solutions and voting systems in cryptocurrency projects.
Thanks Reuben
A great read I will definitely be passing in on to colleagues on my current site.
With my interaction with crypto miners in my industry Resource Extraction, which seems to have a disproportionate number of miners I can see why you have had trouble reaching out to the Firo mining community, those attracted to support privacy style projects from my limited experience are typically very privacy focused in life with a small social media presence.
So most were unaware of a vote through no fault of the project.
What about a simple broadcast message via the chain to notify of an upcoming event is that possible.
The broadcast message is possible and it was in Bitcoin and some other projects as well but most removed it due to the potential of abuse and the power it can wield to the core team for something that is directly within the wallet app.
For e.g. if access to that was compromised and were asked to update to a malicious version or we could be compelled to issue a notice by some entity.
If community is okay with this tradeoff, it is something we can implement relatively easily though.
I am not in favour of the alert system for both Core and/or Electrum wallet. Past events has shown that quite a number of users has lost funds due to phishing message issued through the system.
