TL;DR: vote half-life suggestionDelegate 'votes' are actually more like a measure of reputation (think Stackoverflow) in that cast votes are persistent - so not like votes in the traditional sense of the word. The delegate voting system is currently designed to ensure stability by directing the apathetic to vote for incumbents. Whilst this may have advantages, IMHO this would seem to present the danger that incumbents are likely to attain a near-unassailable position (excepting of course those who exhibit negligent/bad behaviour). This is more of a problem than SO reputation, which of course must be explicitly earned.
If the aim is the create an autocracy - albeit seeded by the 101 or so original gainers of significant 'reputation' - then this is fine. However, it would seem to discourage serious efforts to try and break into the magic 101 circle by newcomers with much to contribute. Currently circa. 220M votes are required and a quick browse of the
delegates shows that with a few notable exceptions, the majority have been in place since a 4 or 5 digit block number - are all of these
current, active contributors?
My preference would be to assign votes/reputation a
half-life - i.e. votes/reputation should decay over time, carrying less weight in proportion to new votes. So while apathy may still lead to new votes,
newer votes - for
more recently earned good deeds/value-add would carry more weight. I think this system would be more meritocratic. For example:-
- delegate.alice earned big votes in the past - way above the 101 threshold, but is no longer active (real examples exist). Even if all future votes for delegate.alice ceased, those historic ones ensure Alice remains 'elected' for some time still. However, decaying old votes would shorten this period, thus allowing new earners of reputation for current valued-added contribution to get elected faster.
Hypothesis:
Current/more recent contribution should be valued more than historical contributions.
In reality, with a still relatively new venture like Bitshares, the 'inactive incumbent' issue may not become much of a problem, as I expect the majority of delegates are still very active contributors and deserve their positions/earnings. However, as the drive towards meritocratic governance and alignment of reward with contribution value seems to be at the heart of the Bitshares project, I'd be interested in people's views on this. Apologies if this has been previously suggested/discussed/discarded.
P.S.
Should a
target delegate annual turnover be desirable (1%, 10%, whatever) this could easily be achieved in a self-regulating way with an algorithm to adjust vote half-life periodically, based upon current turnover rate - akin to POW.
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