A proposal for a new look at the governance model

[abit]

let's measure the engagement based on the expenses incurred on the selected list of fees.

...

BitShares distinguishes 68 different types of fees, there is a lot to choose from.

In this approach, Voting Power comes directly from building BitShares and its active use. I can't imagine anything more pure.

All the data is on chain. Perhaps you can analyze the data to prove your ideas.

I didn't check the data, but I assume that the known scammers and "bad actors" paid a quite big part of fees. On the other hand, when rules change, it's expected that behaviors would change too, so it needs iterations to find suitable rules and it needs time and efforts.

By the way, IMHO, it's the most natural that business owners decide how their businesses would operate. They may listen to users, but will never let the users decide.

[fractalnode]

The question is who gets to decide who are good and who are bad, if it's code to decide, how to define the rules so that good behaviors and bad behaviors can be identified, and bugs are avoided. It's not only what to do, but how to do.

I put forward the following thesis:
let's measure the engagement based on the expenses incurred on the selected list of fees.

I proposed to reward:
* trading on strictly defined tokens (decided by the committee) - here is voting power for everyone
* some of the above-mentioned fees specify specific gateways and reward them for running a business based on BitShares
* the third point concerns remuneration of the dev-team (core & ui) on the basis of the WP community accepted
This is how I see the starting point for further considerations.

Of course, there is a technical question of how to approach it, but at this stage I am interested in the opinion on this approach to Vote Power and nothing else.
What are loopholes?
What could you add to make it even better to measure?

BitShares distinguishes 68 different types of fees, there is a lot to choose from.

In this approach, Voting Power comes directly from building BitShares and its active use. I can't imagine anything more pure.


//
~ maybe Vote Power could be some sort of Vesting balance, but without claim option and with Vote Power decay

[abit]

I think this is the biggest problem DPOS has to deal with in the real world and we can observe all of this, so it deserves the most attention. Neither the BSIP83 nor what we have at the moment solves this problem.

Even when using a stake, a fractional reserve can be used. You surely remember when poloniex had 300 million in a cold wallet and 300 million in a hot wallet. You also remember that their BitShares wallet was kept in maintenance for many months, and it was the same with Steemit. Each of these exchanges is able to put in the "Stake" such amount of tokens, which is able to significantly disturb the functioning of the management structure, especially if we introduce a multiplier.

That's where the lock-forever multiplier comes into play. CEX's may lock up stake, but likely won't lock up a lot of stake forever. In the meanwhile it relies on the good people to act and fight against the bad behaviors -- at their own costs, lock up their own stake. It means we need many people (or stake) who are willing to sacrifice their own benefit for the good of the whole, who try to fix issues, but not people who will simply turn around when issues appear.

Ideally good people do good things and should get rewarded, and as you said,

CEX and large external capital, as well as inactive people, do not have the right to vote. why should they? Why should we allow them to meddle in our affairs?

The question is who gets to decide who are good and who are bad, if it's code to decide, how to define the rules so that good behaviors and bad behaviors can be identified, and bugs are avoided. It's not only what to do, but how to do.

Thank you for the discussion anyway. I wish we can find the solutions.

[fractalnode]

My thoughts were written here: https://github.com/bitshares/bsips/issues/83.

There are many good ideas in BSIP83 and it's hard to disagree with them. Let me quote a few.

IMHO, for a healthy ecosystem, decision making on important things should be serious and relatively stable, so governance voting should only be allowed for long-term self-owned stake only, and interests should be aligned.

* stakes in balances can be liquidized / transferred / sold at any time, allow voting with balance means instability, may negatively impact decision making, because everyone can obtain (buy) some stake and participate in and influence decision making (voting) at any time immediately, then sold them at any time immediately when no longer want to participate, with no consequence;

* utilized stakes should be considered as "used" but not "being owned", thus stakes in collateral or market orders should not be counted in;
for stakes in collateral, it means debts exist and the positions can be liquidized in various ways, thus the stakes are not 100% owned;
for stakes in market orders, it means they're for sale, which showed unwillingness to hold;

That is why I proposed a token that cannot be exchanged or transferred. Vote power is generated by good work, you don't transfer or trade your reputation.
Good work, just like a good reputation degrades over time, and so does VOTE token. (OL vote ! sic)

one controversial topic is, should people be allowed to suddenly start influencing decision making with a big stake, especially if said decisions will invalidate earlier efforts made by other stake holders. IMHO it's better to minimize influence of this behavior, e.g. requires a holding period for voting.

I think this is the biggest problem DPOS has to deal with in the real world and we can observe all of this, so it deserves the most attention. Neither the BSIP83 nor what we have at the moment solves this problem.

Even when using a stake, a fractional reserve can be used. You surely remember when poloniex had 300 million in a cold wallet and 300 million in a hot wallet. You also remember that their BitShares wallet was kept in maintenance for many months, and it was the same with Steemit. Each of these exchanges is able to put in the "Stake" such amount of tokens, which is able to significantly disturb the functioning of the management structure, especially if we introduce a multiplier.



There is another element that nobody mentioned on the occasion of BTS in Stake. Consider such a situation.

You wrote a great WP and it was successfully accepted by the community, you yourself put few millions BTS in stake. The community is happy that BitShares will be even better, so the BTS price as in March 2017 soars + 13,000% (x130). People who did not put BTS in Stake, but Short bitAssets increase the amount of BTS, and their potential Vote Power increases. "Bad capital" is catching up with "good capital". This is the reward for "misbehavior" and you, in a way, "lose" instead of gain.

Now let's come back to my idea for a moment. There are many fighting camps in BitShares, let's just take cn-vote and beos as an example.

BEOS team put a bot on HERO, maybe GS would not show up. The team earns money by providing liquidity and also increases their vote power by paying a trade fee. HERO works, everyone is happy.
At the same time, BEOS is working on its chain, but in the meantime they offer a gateway to EOS tokens, it turns out that you can trade EOS tokens on BitShares. Each of the new dApps communities on EOS gains knowledge about their ancestor BitShares and it suddenly turns out that BitShares DEX is more efficient than newdex.io There is a topic in the media space that newdex is not really DEX, because you have to send them your tokens, in the case of BitShares it is unnecessary because you are trading account to account. There is attention from a dozen hot communities at once.

CN-VOTE creates a fund, issues a token in exchange for shares in the trading bot on bitCNY, ... etc. The cn-vote account pays a lot of fees and provides a lot of liquidity in the market, maybe there wouldn't even be a GS threat on bitCNY and no feed price locking. At the same time, they gains vote power and pays dividends from the profits from his MM bot to his community.

The dev core & ui team realizes WP, in return for successfully completed projects, they receive a VOTE token. Of course, as talented people they also generate a lot of vote power by trading bots on DEX.

Gates: GDEX, RUDEX, XBTS, IOBANKER compete with each other by offering their clients viral tokens from TOP 50 CMC, plus a whole family of tokens from ETH and EOS and other viral tokens. Their turnover increases, they pay more and more fees, and in return their vote power increases. In addition, their revenues increase and the sense of security of the business.

A new WP is created that creates a connector for the humminig bot, bitshares appears on the existing DEX lists. New speculative capital flows into BitShares DEX.

CEX and large external capital, as well as inactive people, do not have the right to vote. why should they? Why should we allow them to meddle in our affairs?

[abit]

My thoughts were written here: https://github.com/bitshares/bsips/issues/83.

[fractalnode]

Thank you for your answer.
I am primarily interested in your opinion about gamification, I proposed as resistance to threats and a natural selection of people with greater voting power.
I am not sure if the proposed method of measuring engagement is good enough.
I would love to know your proposal of such a measurement and the loopholes you see in it.

[abit]

• we need to attract users to trade
• we want gateways to introduce tokens attractive to users and help ensure liquidity on them
• we want development proposals that are interesting for everyone and we want to reward the people who implement them. asap.

I am well aware of the needs, and working towards them. However, the progress is slow, since my individual strength is small. We need to gather people with the same visions together, concentrate the resources we have, work towards the goals.

On the other hand, those are still open questions but not solutions. To find the answers and solutions, we still have a long way to go.

I was hoping that we could afford some innovations that would attract the attention of the entire DPOS community.

Innovations are hard. Many failed silently.

[binggo]

1) Preventing CEX exchanges from voting, as well as other wallets holding other people's tokens
2) Hostile takeover by purchasing large amounts of tokens and attempting to forcefully change the existing community
3) buying votes
4) manipulating other people's opinions by providing incomplete information

If want really to solve these problems，need to overhaul all the management structure, i more like the design of "Tezos".

1.only can lower CEX“s desire to vote, but solve it is impossible.

2.only can lower the “Hostile takeover” probability，no one can solve it，even BTC

3.I think this can be solved.

4.I don't understand what‘s that mean, as most of the people only can get incomplete information or they only want to trust the incomplete information, nothing can change that, a social issue.

Some thoughts:

Vote locked; only witness can vote;

If a witness want to become one active witness，he must meet these qualifications：

1.The witness need to pledge a certain amount of bts as security deposit; for example, 320,000.0 bts.

2.The witness need to get enough proof of staking from bts holders to become an active witness; for example, 3M bts.

If he can meet these qualifications, he will become the active witness.

One witness one staking, one witness one vote；
The witness will earn more reward from the blocks transaction fee if this witness have more staking support；
The witness can share the reward of producing the block and the blocks transaction fee to their staking support；
The margin position can't staking；
The witness will get the VP of the staking from bts holders.

The power balance between witness and bts holders.

Will have, for example, 89 slots to produce the blocks in every period, every slot can contain 3 witnesses，when the slot begin to produce the block, will randomly choose one witnesses from these 3 witnesses in the slot to produce the block.
In every period, will randomly choose 3 witnesses from all the active witnesses to arrange into every slot.

continue...


Reference:
https://medium.com/casperlabs/the-collective-action-problem-of-on-chain-governance-faf560106ac5

[fractalnode]

I was hoping you would refer to the idea and the changes in the theory of the game for influence.

• we need to attract users to trade
• we want gateways to introduce tokens attractive to users and help ensure liquidity on them
• we want development proposals that are interesting for everyone and we want to reward the people who implement them. asap.

You don't have to explain the status quo to me.
I live long enough that I know these rules and I'm here long enough to know that these rules are slowing us down terribly.
I was hoping that we could afford some innovations that would attract the attention of the entire DPOS community.
We were the best 5 years ago. Today, everyone else is quick to achieve goals, and we are constantly fighting for power instead of implementing solutions that will allow us to maintain an advantage.

[abit]

Here is a good article about hostile takeover: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hostiletakeover.asp

And about voting rights: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/votingright.asp

BitShares is just like a company.

[fractalnode]

"Governance powered by engagement"

A.) Vision

I believe the best intentions and the best vision have people who actively build BitShares and people who actively use it. These people should have the greatest influence on how BitShares develops in the future. In other words, you must have "skin in the game" or "dirty hands". Outsiders won't have any influence on our platform until they naturally deserve it. Too often I have heard criticism and advice from people who don't even know how it works, or hardly ever use it.
Traders are basically customers, each company must listen to its customers and in order to grow.
Another group are those who build this "framework", that is programmers and gateways. We can measure the effectiveness of programmers by accepting their projects (i.e. accepting a vision for further development)
We can also measure the effectiveness of the gates by the number of customers they have (turnover on their tokens). I would exclude all the rest as an uninvolved or even dangerous group → CEX, ~ Justin Sun, Custodial Wallets



B.) We have the following problems to solve and we all know examples of where they occur:

1) Preventing CEX exchanges from voting, as well as other wallets holding other people's tokens
2) Hostile takeover by purchasing large amounts of tokens and attempting to forcefully change the existing community
3) buying votes
4) manipulating other people's opinions by providing incomplete information

C.) Proposal to solve the problem.

1) The right to vote gives a separate token, eg VOTE
2) The VOTE token's voice strength decreases over time. Parameters for discussion.
3) The VOTE token cannot be exchanged for other tokens or transferred to another account.
4.) 1 token = 1 vote
for all categories separately
- Witnesses
- Committee
- WP
- BSIP

D) The VOTE token is airdroped on the accounts in proportion to the costs incurred for only selected transaction fees.

a.) *trading fees
b.) fees incurred on WP if accepted by the community
c.) *issue asset (I mean the issue of eg GATEWAY.BTC in exchange for a deposit, to further strengthen the business, on tokens also approved by Committee)
d.) *feed price fee
e.) and maybe some other fee ....

*applies only to a specific list of tokens accepted by the committee

Notes on point "D"

Certainly, some fees, such as those incurred for a transfer, should be excluded because of the fact that CEX exchanges pay the most.
In addition, the remuneration received by people during the work on WP should be taken into account. It will certainly be difficult to calculate the appropriate factor, it should be high enough to appreciate this work, but also not to create hegemony. Some statistical analysis should be performed before such a conversion is applied.

E.) In fact, we do not want a lot of people to vote, we want people who have an opinion on a given topic or want to speak on a given matter to vote. Therefore, it could be done quite classically.

1.) New projects under WP are visible in the chain from the first day of the month and their maturity date is at the end of that month. There is a month for everyone to get to know the project and discuss it. There is no room for unexpected votes that no one knows about, as new WPs are always 1 day of the month.
2.) We always vote for or against.
3.) WP pass by most votes 50% (or 2/3 for discussion)
4.) only LTM account can become proxy, as long as we want the proxy to still exist?

Notes on point "E"
I am not really sure if the proxy is a good idea. It kindles emotions of a political nature, and I don't know if it serves us well. We certainly want whoever is involved to vote, but not everyone has to. I guess this approach filters out a lot of random and manipulated votes and leaves only the ones that are really involved. Moreover, it does not exclude the impact on other people via social media who may want to imitate our votes and opinions, but it excludes the votes of people not involved in social media, or those with whom we do not have direct contact.

In this way, the number of voters will certainly be smaller, but for the same reason the discussion between them will certainly be of better quality.