A super delegate system - Re-inventing the Roman Republic

[r0ach]

Guys, you need to be clear about that BitShares is a company and not a government. Not each person has a vote but each share. Hence, we are NOT talking democratic voting!!!
People that have more BTS have more face in the game, more too loose by "mismanagement" and those more voting power.

Yes, I know, but the way I see things playing out is the following.  Gold has a large market cap and it kind of exists outside of governments, but this is only because gold has a hard glass ceiling.  It doesn't function well in a modern economy from liquidity and granularity issues, and only really functions well as a central bank reserve.  People used to take gold and silver coins to a market and say, "I want a chicken", and the vendor would approximate the value of the chicken to whatever coins they had.  This doesn't work in a modern economy.  Nobody even has the authority to do things like haggle over price  Everything is extremely granular, making gold almost useless.

This is why gold has a hard glass ceiling, but if a cryptocurrency ever reached any similar level of success, which it probably will, it's not going to stop at that point, it will just keep on flying by.  Since cryptocurrency has no glass ceiling whatsoever, governments will have to either relinquish all monetary powers in their kingdoms, or co-opt the currency themselves.  They will either boycott the currency and pass laws against it, or they'll demand to be delegates in the currency system.  Eventually, all of your associates are going to vote you out/sell out, just to have access to the higher market cap to increase their share price until nobody remains except governments for each delegate position.  This same thing would play out at a global level where each nation would demand fair representation or they won't use it.  What I'm saying is, I don't see the act of voting meaning much of anything if the coin got big, it would be more like inevitable actions at that point.

[santaclause102]

Why would a super delegate vote for someone that acts not like itself?

Anonymous voting would likely be required so that junior delegates aren't forced to conform to the senior delegate.  In that instance, as I explained, worst case scenario you have the exact same political system as before, just with more redundancy, but more likely, you would also see an increase in distribution of power as well.  Another benefit, speaking about humans from a sociology standpoint, you don't want a king because the king could be a psychopath, so the more people you have sharing power, the more you hedge against irrational or destructive behavior in general.

You didn't factor this in:

Also there is not much of a continuum for a witness (new block producing role in bitshares 2.0) to act like. A witness can either be honest or not (aside from performance (uptime etc.))

[xeroc]

Guys, you need to be clear about that BitShares is a company and not a government. Not each person has a vote but each share. Hence, we are NOT talking democratic voting!!!
People that have more BTS have more face in the game, more too loose by "mismanagement" and those more voting power.

[r0ach]

Based on the current market value, a lot of people may not care about this, but after the market value of the big, I think we will re explore。r0ach，Your suggestion is very meaningful.

I'll be first to admit it's not a perfect solution.  I just have a hard time imagining how you would scale past 101 delegates if necessary without using some kind of system like this.  Some people might also disagree with my assessment about the end game of Bitshares, with each nation having one delegate or something like that if it became world reserve currency.  I believe if the market cap of BTS became high enough, both governments and the public would probably demand it and force their way in.

[wuyanren]

Based on the current market value, a lot of people may not care about this, but after the market value of the big, I think we will re explore。r0ach，Your suggestion is very meaningful.

[r0ach]

The more I thought about this post, the more I think I need to explain some caveats.  The most likely end game for Bitshares in current form, if widespread adoption occured, would be nation states replacing individual delegates and operating as a world reserve currency.  Through pressure by the legal system, force (same difference), or boycotting the system entirely until they're forced in as delegates, this would likely occur.  Under such circumstances, you would just raise the delegate limit to total number of countries participating in the economic system. 

Some people will say, wow, that sounds horrible like a new world order.  No, really, it's not.  Instead of having one federal reserve controlling the entire planet, you would now have 101-200ish different central banks that all have to obey the same rules.  You would no longer have issues where countries like China devalue their currency to raise exports, thus devaluing your labor in another country via GLA (global labor arbitrage).  You would no longer have insane keynesianism that collapses the entire world economy.  There would be many benefits.

The super delegate idea is only needed in a system where Bitshares became world-wide huge but did not make the leap to global reserve currency.  In a situation like this, more distrbution of power and redundancy would be needed.

[donkeypong]

From the perspective of solving the problems that the technology needs to have solved, I think the DPOS system is the best thing out there. From the perspective of governance and long term behavior of the system, this is still a very early experiment. We have no idea how it is going to develop over time as the whole ecosystem grows.

The consuls in Rome always had power because they often were the biggest, baddest generals/warlords at the time or else they were the yes men for politically powerful senators. But of course, the Roman system provides great lessons.

And in the end, the voter also needs to decide how to yield the power of the ballot box. I tend to favor the trustee model (give the leaders some space to operate and let them do their thing, then decide after a period of time whether it's been good) over the representative model (leaders always checking with people, taking the pulse, doing what's politically popular), though some blend of the two is ideal.

Or you can say, fuck it, what we really need is a benevolent dictator. If he's a sonofabitch, we fork that shite!

[Troglodactyl]

There is also a trade off between number of nodes securing the network and cost to the network.  Especially as we end up having to use more and more powerful servers to run our witnesses.  How would these sub delegates get paid?  Wouldn't there be an incentive for witnesses to just run multiple witnesses from the same node and pretend they had different individuals running them?  Perhaps if they sub witnesses were paid from the elected witnesses pay.  Then it could be considered a service the witness provides.

I'm of the opinion that ten witnesses is too few.  101 might be enough.  1000 would be better.  How much are we willing to pay for security though, and how much is enough security?

How many witnesses is enough is dependent on the quality and distribution of those witnesses and on the circumstances surrounding them, as well as the cost of adding each additional witness.

[r0ach]

For the most part I agree with you r0ach.  However depending on how the extra witnesses are paid wouldn't this open us up to more Sybil attacks?  What would prevent a witness from voting in two more of his own nodes to triple his pay.  I'm also not convinced that proxy voting can't scale to 1000.  In the short term I think we have more work cut out for us getting the number of witnesses above the default ten, and ensuring they are all separate individuals.

Yea, it's not an urgent thing.  I was just exploring ways to scale past 101 delegates if necessary, but it's not required for the system to function.  This kind of gets into the area of term limits in government.  The longer people serve as delegates, the more they have to lose if being discovered as running the junior delegates themselves instead of real people.  If they only run as delegates for a short period, they're more likely to impersonate the junior delegates themselves.

Due to voter apathy in all types of voting and political systems, it seems to me like the incumbent always has the advantage and would stay a decent amount of time.  The startup cost of running a node is also high as the system scales, further keeping delegates in place for longer.  This is with the exception of if Bitshares was jumping from a small time currency to a global currency and different nations demanded to be delegates or they would boycott the system, thus forcing their vote in, which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing for provable distribution.

[puppies]

For the most part I agree with you r0ach.  However depending on how the extra witnesses are paid wouldn't this open us up to more Sybil attacks?  What would prevent a witness from voting in two more of his own nodes to triple his pay.  I'm also not convinced that proxy voting can't scale to 1000.  In the short term I think we have more work cut out for us getting the number of witnesses above the default ten, and ensuring they are all separate individuals.

[r0ach]

There is also a trade off between number of nodes securing the network and cost to the network.  Especially as we end up having to use more and more powerful servers to run our witnesses.  How would these sub delegates get paid?  Wouldn't there be an incentive for witnesses to just run multiple witnesses from the same node and pretend they had different individuals running them?  Perhaps if they sub witnesses were paid from the elected witnesses pay.  Then it could be considered a service the witness provides.

I'm of the opinion that ten witnesses is too few.  101 might be enough.  1000 would be better.  How much are we willing to pay for security though, and how much is enough security?

1000 is too much to elect, so if you want 1000, it would have to be done by owning a certain amount of coins with voting removed entirely.  That's why I made this post, it's the only way to scale up delegate count and still have voting, otherwise you would just use a specified resource number to be a node in the first place.  Due to it's crap distribution, I've heard people claim some guy named "Otoh" or something runs 500 Darkcoin nodes himself, which is basically a giant sybil attack.

In summary, here are the choices
-----------------------------------------------
1)  A specific number of coins required to run a node and it's entirely a free lance system with no voting.  If distribution is bad, you have tons of sybil nodes running from one actor, but there's really no such thing as "good" distribution in currency.  No matter what real world currency or altcoin you look at, the sybil nodes would likely always be a problem.

2)  Voting for a set number of nodes, which would in my opinion, mostly evolve into a system where delegates can only be voted in by not being anonymous in the long run and being some kind of public person, business, NGO, or whatever.  It doesn't really matter if they're Kanye West or the Red Cross, just as long as people know they aren't a sybil node.  The downfall is that you can't expect people to vote for a billion candidates so it's hard to scale redundancy past a certain number, hence my solution in this post.

3)  The top 101 account balances that decide to run as delegates are automatically elected since they have the most to lose by the system failing.  Besides people claiming it would be an aristocracy, you also have the problem of sybil nodes like option #1.

Overall, option #2 seems to work the best for scaling up to global reserve currency.  Each nation state can be well represented in that manner instead of just an aristocracy from one country, or possibly forever having a sybil problem like Darkcoin in the other option.  Once the system scaled large enough, the biggest nations would eventually demand a seat at the delegate table or they would boycott the system.  It would definitely work as a distributed system in that case.

The number of witnesses in 2.0 is scalable and is set by voters.  So if it is determined that 101 is not enough and we need more, this can be achieved.

Yes, I know that, but like I said, 101 is already a large number to deal with, so going any further would require either my system above or RDPOS.  I haven't thoroughly analyzed RDPOS yet, but it seems like it might evolve into some kind of party platform like republicans vs democrats, but who knows.  If RDPOS isn't a flop, the two systems could even be combined.

[Ander]

The number of witnesses in 2.0 is scalable and is set by voters.  So if it is determined that 101 is not enough and we need more, this can be achieved. 

[Akado]

But Witnesses if I understood right, will act as nodes and produce blocks and we can elect as many witnesses as we want, it's not limited to 101.

As for workers, they have a daily budget of 432,000 BTS so as long as workers can work within that budget, even if they are a lot, there shouldn't be any limitation on their number from what I've read.

Also, proxy voting allows you to give your voting power to someone you trust, meaning all those problems if I've understood correctly are all pretty much solver. So we already have a BitShares Republic

[puppies]

There is also a trade off between number of nodes securing the network and cost to the network.  Especially as we end up having to use more and more powerful servers to run our witnesses.  How would these sub delegates get paid?  Wouldn't there be an incentive for witnesses to just run multiple witnesses from the same node and pretend they had different individuals running them?  Perhaps if they sub witnesses were paid from the elected witnesses pay.  Then it could be considered a service the witness provides.

I'm of the opinion that ten witnesses is too few.  101 might be enough.  1000 would be better.  How much are we willing to pay for security though, and how much is enough security?

[r0ach]

Why would a super delegate vote for someone that acts not like itself?

Anonymous voting would likely be required so that junior delegates aren't forced to conform to the senior delegate.  In that instance, as I explained, worst case scenario you have the exact same political system as before, just with more redundancy, but more likely, you would also see an increase in distribution of power as well.  Another benefit, speaking about humans from a sociology standpoint, you don't want a king because the king could be a psychopath, so the more people you have sharing power, the more you hedge against irrational or destructive behavior in general.