Actually it’s not really an abstention. It’s a vote to keep the current value, whatever it is.
It depends how you consider apathetic minters negatively influence voting. It’s not clear to me. In the protocol upgrade it was clear: they (allegedly) prevented the protocol switch.
They will influence the vote whatever we do. But we can change how they do it. Right now, regarding the new votes they vote to keep the current values. If we add the abstention system they will not vote at all. Then we have 2 choices: either calculate the result from less votes, or calculate the result on the same number of blocks by getting earlier blocks until we have enough blocks. This can be decided per vote (as it requires an update on each vote). During the discussion about abstention it was decided to calculate the result on less votes.
If we apply that to the reputation vote, then the result will be the same as before, because the apathetic minters currently already vote for no signer, so it’d be the same if we don’t use their vote (the reputation is the sum of the votes).
On the number of signers and the reward we use a median, so the result would change. It’s not easy to say how though. If you have 10% voting for 1 signer, 30% voting for 2, 40% voting for 10 and 20% abstaining, and the current value is 2, then:
- with the previous system the 20% actually vote for 2 so the result would be 2
- with abstention votes removed the median would be calculated only with the voting 80% and the result would be 10 (but would need a single vote to switch from 10 to 2 to get back to 2)
It’s not clear to me there is a benefit here. It depends what the problem is.
On the asset vote most of the values are median too, so the change would be similar. Except for the introduction of a new assets where it requires an absolute majority. So we would have to decide how it’s changed too.
This is something they can do without a protocol change. All the signers would just have to agree on the amount and implement it in the code they use. Otherwise they would generate different transactions and could not agree to sign one. They already have to agree on the tx fee anyway.
For a new asset to be added it requires an absolute majority of the last 2000 blocks to vote for it with the same exponent value. We did this because they are permanent decisions (assets cannot be removed and exponents cannot be changed). Other values are decided by median and can be changed later once the asset has been added.
So I guess there’s no absolute majority yet. Unfortunately we have not implemented an RPC that returns the asset votes.