New Governance Framework Voting on Superhero.com!

All power to the AE community! This has been a long-hanging topic and it’s about time we face this next milestone in æternity history: GOVERNANCE.

To get comprehensive voting outcomes, first, a clear set of mechanisms and protocols must be in place. And as a member of the æternity community (yes, you), your voice is important to the evolution of the platform and therefore, in establishing the framework needed for it to succeed.

Pre-vote:

It is suggested to create a dedicated voting forum post in the PoS On-Chain Governance forum category.

Discussions can be done on the Forum in order to narrow down options for governance votes. In this regard, you, the community can also propose a process.

Voting Framework:

We want you, the community, to decide on the most important parameters to qualify what makes a vote valid. Here are some general indications which can be elaborated in follow-up votes if desired by the community:

1. Minimum duration of a legitimate voting:

  • 1 week
  • 2 weeks
  • 1 month
  • longer than one month
  • less than one week
  • This voting parameter is not needed

2. Minimum number of votes for a legitimate voting:

  • 10 votes
  • 20 votes
  • 50 votes
  • 100 votes
  • 200 votes
  • More than 200 votes
  • Less than 10 votes
  • This voting parameter is not needed

3. Quorum for a legitimate voting result:

  • 51% yes
  • 60% yes
  • 75% yes
  • 90% yes
  • 100% yes
  • This voting parameter is not needed

4. Minimum representation of total tokenholders (in %):

  • 0.5%
  • 1%
  • 2%
  • 5%
  • 10%
  • More than 10%
  • Dynamic: Voters need to claim voting tokens every month to participate (to be specified in follow up votes if selected)
  • This voting parameter is not needed

5. Should known exchange addresses be blacklisted from voting?

  • Yes
  • No

If there are other parameters that should be considered, please comment below.

Voting Aftermath:

The voting framework is supposed to help make polls more useful and effective for making decisions by anyone in the æcosystem. Grant applications and project proposals can be written based on the outcome of such polls. For example, a grant application for the specific voting topic could be created to make changes on the protocol level, and then another voting would need to be made so the community can approve the work when it is done. Then miners could decide to implement the changes that were signaled by the community. This way, polls can help to create meaningful changes, but of course actions can also be taken by anyone in the æcosystem without a prior voting. In any case, the forum thread should always be updated on the developments around the vote.

The discussion starts here, but please join this Friday’s Superhero League episode June 12th at 4 PM CEST. There will be a panel on the governance mechanics and this is a good opportunity to converse live about things that really matter for the AE community.

Please post here if you want to participate as a speaker on Friday or if you want to change any of the voting questions (1-5). I will create the 5 polls for the new Governance Framework on Superhero.com by Friday morning CEST so we can get this going. I suggest to set these framework votings for 2 weeks if no one here thinks differently.

13 Likes

1 - At least 4 weeks. You should add one that says the time is directly proportional to the amount of work perceived to be required and/or its impact over the network.

2 - Doesn’t matter how many votes there are. you should have another option that says: this metric doesn’t matter.

3 - This depends on the format and the question, while it is normally accepted 51% is majority. You could have several options and have multiple choices, or more than 2 choices. in that case, wouldn;t majority be at least 34% in the case of 3? or 26% in the case of 4?

4 - This depends on the level of participation also. You can’t say you want 1% of the voting power to be effective if, for instance, 20% is in the bri, 30% is in miner pools, and of the 50% remaining not even 1% is ACTIVELY voting. I would say a good rule would be for people to claim participation and then they can Vote or abstein. But in this manner you know how many are active members. and based on this activity you can then set a reasonable number.

  • NOTE: For instance the BRI was the first and only successful governance vote in AE but it is not recorded in this new method, and as such can’t even be considered as a base measure. Remember right now there is no way to vote with your money in a hardware key, only base app accepts votes right now, and this is being solved with superhero wallet. As such, saying you want the whole population to vote, is not even impossible but unreal. In my case, in my country, the percentage of the population that voted in the last election in favor of our presdient was 18%. But if you consider votes and not people that couldn’t vote then it goes up to 30%. 30% seems like a good marging for 1 out of 5 choices. but 18% doesn’t fare up as good. So this value has to be dynamic. You really don’t want the porcentage to be 1% and then realize that 20% is in a wallet that is lost with no way to recover it.

5 - Yes, same with the BRI Funds, and mining pools. Unless the exchange has an implementation that allows the user to issue his vote in favor or not, there should not be an entity that controls a lot of voting power with no representation or intention.

6 - Votes should not be staked by balance on an account at a given point of time. This should be more like, if you claim your Ballouts each month you get a defined number of tokens created to be used that month on voting. Why is this important? because you could give the tokens to your users if you were an exchange and allow them to vote, which is currently impossible while using the balance at height method.

3 Likes

Nice that this debate is taking place, putting my two pennies for reflection.

I philosophically believe in on-chain governance but then the reality makes me critically think about it, take Aragon as an example, probably one of the most developed on-chain governance experiments, now dismantled because of null participation from the community, still let us try to get some lessons from that experience:

  • First proposal voted contained the general guidelines about “rules” for votes and so on in a similar way as AEX-1 defines how the expansions are considered/implemented. This AGP-1 had an extensive discussion and changes prior to be voted and enforced, that is precisely what we are doing here, defining how voting is made, this thread ideally should end in a commonly agreed proposal about votings and its implications to be voted within the app. Here some reference links about the discussion and the final AGP1 content.

https://aragon.org/blog/final-results-from-the-agp-1-vote

Even in that very relevant vote only 45 accounts representing 2,62 % of the ANT tokens supply, you can imagine how it went with the other votes.

  • With low participation, a single large holder can change the output of the vote in one click and “impose” its will. This has happened more than once in the case of Aragon.

I am taking this example because I consider it the most empirically tested on-chain governance experiment based on stake voting.

Sadly this is how it ended , being voted to be removed in AGP 155 Highly recommended reading.

  • Wrapping up:

IMHO the most relevant discussion is how to incentivate people to participate and being active, not only in voting but also in writing and curating meaningful proposals to be voted, the rest is completely secondary and comes after getting people involved.

There is need for some curation and filter for proposals to be considered for implementation, what if anyone makes a proposal which goes against the foundational principles or poses a risk for the network and it gets approved with the relevant quorum, number of votes and so on. Community submitted votes are a good way of signalling the will of the community but making them binding it is just not possible nor realistic.
Out of that community proposals some might get to be subject of another proposal when curated and checked as feasible/meaningful by not by default.

Think that now 45 % of ae tokens are held in exchanges (please hold your keys community!!!) should the network destiny be in the hands of exchanges even though they are somehow part of the community? well I have serious doubts about this but no address should be prevented from voting and even though it would , that is easily trickable. Let’s just not maintain so many tokens in exchanges.

Last and as big difference to the Aragon gov which is just staking based and has no PoW implications it is obvious that in what relates to network changes / forks miners have the ultimate voice as @erik.chain is pointing out… no other blockchain has gone this way of approaching a Pow + Pos approach, and it is so exciting to go through this as a community, paved ways lead to places where others already have been,

Join the debate on friday and let`s go together where no one has been before!!

6 Likes

I don’t know how we could introduce a similar thing. but what I found very interesting on the NEM blockchain was the importance score of different accounts - but that is baked into their core protocol.

accounts that held a certain stake of tokens for a longer time period and accounts that are very active on the network have more importance than others and thus their voice counts more.

at least it would somehow be good to avoid people having much power by just buying a big stake of tokens for a specific vote.

maybe it would be possible to track the time the tokens were delegated to / staked (or held) by a certain account to provide those accounts a bigger voice that have done that for a longer period of time.

5 Likes

I don’t think it should be a requirement, but a suggestion to vote in the forum. The creator of the poll should be free to reference the discussion tool of choice in the poll.

what defines a legitimate vote other than these parameters, and who decides that. None of the parameters matter if this is not clear.

strongly depends on the topic, some maybe needed quickly, some maybe can’t be finally decided in years. What if the timeframe is set but the discussion takes longer?

Can’t be fixed, anyone can create unlimited “free” accounts

depends on the poll that is opened, e.g. for BRI vote the possible answers were 0,1,2,…,20 and it was communicated ahead of time the weighted average will be the result unless majority is 0.

this will not work out as such, if there is a minimum number minor topics may never be decided or have an opinion formed. If there is a fixed number individual high worth accounts can lead decisions.

no, they are legitimate token/share-holders in the ecosystem, if they wish they can allow the individual account holders to receive voting power.

We shouldn’t think in hard set rules for “governance” but of a polling system for those who wish to market and convince others for their idea. Anyone can look at the final polling numbers and see for them selves if they think this is legitimate. If they run a node or a miner they may switch fork, if they are developer they may develop something, if they are good marketers, they can convince others of their opinion, if they are token holders they can show their opinion.

why should the Crypto Foundation be a governing body here?

as seen from other blockchain protocols, most of the community doesn’t follow development so closely

Miners are free to implement the changes whenever.

3 Likes

I guess it can, it is still recorded on aeternity/ethereum blockchain and can always be verified, at ~10% stake participation it gives a good base measure of what to expect.

There is, tokens can be moved off the hardware wallet if the user finds voting as important.

also not true, anyone signing a contract transaction can participate in voting.

Interesting idea, but inventing such system and verify its working without issues is hard, can you reference some related work regarding this?

1 Like

sounds very interesting, this is definitely a possibility to implement and make voting more “fair”

2 Likes

Quite agree with @philipp.chain. You can even vote on votes. Or tip votes and campaigns. It’s a sound base, transparent and crypto secure, for an ecosystem of token users, delegates and miners.

1 Like
  1. Duration
    A) 1 month. People can set a reminder each month who aren’t active on the forum can have the opportunity of participating in all votes

  2. Number of votes
    A) at least 1 :joy: too easy to gain the rules and a difficult to prove. While it would be sad if and important vote got less than 10 votes, I don’t think that we will have that problem if the community is healthy

  3. Pass threshold
    A) this might need to vary but that is hard to do decentralized

  4. Tokens voted to be valid
    A) 1 percent at least to start but I hope we can do much better (1% of the non blacklisted tokens)

  5. Exchanges
    Blacklist them. They do not represent the customers whose tokens they hold. There is a counter-argument to this bbut blacklisting is necessary when the exchanges have such huge amounts

You missed the whole point. It can not. It was used in a different platform, where the voting method was a simple signed message in json format. Since this was NOT in the current version it CAN NOT be used as measure for the current and NEW method.

Still missing the point, moving it from your cold or hardware wallet to vote is not a proper solution, then voting is not accessible.

Where is this documented and exposed? is it even shown in the poll page? in the governance aepp? on the forum? Please give us the link, information, and usage.

There are several systems in place that allow this to some degree or another, for example in EA forums you vote on the things that you see often or bugs that affect you and they are prioritized, on Wyze forums they do the same thing, there was another forum that I remember that I got 10 voting points per month, not revolving, so the points were only usable that same month, and the top 10 things were the ones considered by the core team to be implemented. Sure it was not done by a blockchain, but this is not a novel idea and should not be too hard. Perhaps drafting a definition for this and then creating a vote so this gets funded if the idea is good is a good idea?

Not really, you are assuming that every amount of AE is being hold by an active member of the blockchain, and that everyone shows intent to vote. By this measure if I create a poll and add a single answer: Should yani remain the Real CEO of AEternity and the only answer is “yes” and 99% do not vote that means you shouldn’t. right? because everyone is active and the asumption or lack of participation is intentional. You are assuming the same on delegates and miners. I could delegate my AE but that doesn’t mean i really agree with ALL the votes taken there in, however your “transparent cryptosecure sound system” assumes that is true, when it is a complete lie.

1 Like

Voting is accessible if you have access to the tokens, I agree it’s not a good solution, but if the poll is of importance for you its a solution.

With basic knowledge of aeternity blockchain you can make a contract transaction to the vote function, all open source, no need to do anything else than to sign the tx and send it to the network. aepp-governance/governance-contracts/contracts/Poll.aes at master · aeternity/aepp-governance · GitHub

Sounds great to me, I’m all in favor for such a system!

So any hardware wallet with access to calling contracts should be able to vote. however, there is not an straight forward way for a normal user (not a developer, programmer, builder, compiler, or at least software engineer to some degree) make the call and vote. Correct?

If my previous statement is correct, this proves the asumption that Yani had about everyone that has AE coins being able to vote to be false. Which supports my position that in order to know with precision how many people are active and can participate you can’t just say anyone that has AE.

I think I have been meddling with aeternity more than the average crypto user by an ample marging, and I am not even sure how to call the contract you linked. While I can read it and make out what it is meant to do I have no clue where to go to my hardware wallet to even call it. Nor do I know of a single hardware wallet currently that allows for call preparation, compilation, signing and transmission from within or using a hardware wallet.

I agree with @philipp.chain and do not see the aeternity Crypto Foundation as a controlling and implementing unit of the voting process. If as consequence of the voting new grant applications are created by the developers the foundation will be happy to process it.

5 Likes

@lydia Thanks for your feedback, I will move this thread to a different category then.

1 Like

loyalty rewards

I have created the polls #16 - #20 with the feedback from this forum thread on https://superhero.com/voting

The polls are set for 2 weeks for now, but there will be definitely follow up votes to further determine and hopefully establish a community standard for what constitutes a valid voting result (which can be used by anyone in the æcosystem).

Please also join the discussion about these votes on SuperheroLeague, we are starting in 15 minutes on league.superhero.com/broadcast (find the schedule on superhero.com/league)

2 Likes

Here are the results of the first round of voting on a new governance voting framework backed by the æternity community. You can check and verify the results on https://superhero.com/voting in the “closed” category.

Poll #16: How long should a valid voting take?

Total stake: 55587 AE (total 9 votes)

Closed on 6/26/2020 at 4:59:17 PM (Block 275807)

  • 88% voted for proportional to the amount of work perceived to be required and/or its impact over the network
  • 5% voted for 1 month
  • 4% voted for better to not fix the time and create follow up votes if the discussion takes longer
  • 3% voted for longer than one month

Poll #17: How many people should participate in a valid voting?

Total stake: 53865 AE (total 8 votes)

Closed on 6/26/2020 at 4:59:17 PM (Block 275807)

  • 100% voted for This voting parameter is not needed

Poll #18: Quorum for a legitimate valid result

Total stake: 67023 AE (total 9 votes)

Closed on 6/26/2020 at 5:17:52 PM (Block 275810)

  • 71% voted for 51% yes
  • 29% voted for Other (suggest on the forum)

Poll #19: Percentage of tokenholders for a valid voting?

Total stake: 21144 AE (total 5 votes)

Closed on 6/26/2020 at 5:19:59 PM (Block 275811)

  • 90% voted for Dynamic: Voters need to claim voting tokens every month to participate
  • 10% voted for This parameter is not needed

Poll #20: Count in votes from exchanges for a valid voting?

Total stake: 67699 AE (total 12 votes)

Closed on 6/26/2020 at 5:09:52 PM (Block 275809)

  • 77% voted for No
  • 23% voted for Yes

Now everyone can decide for themselves how to interpret these results for their own governance votings. Let us know if you want to do a follow up voting about the community-backed framework voting. Let’s also brainstorm here on your interpretations of these results and if you think we should add any other parameters for a new community-backed voting standard.

4 Likes

Nice project