In the current protocol some votes are weighted by the share days destroyed by the minter. That means a vote cast by an old output will have more weight than a recent output. And a vote cast by an output with a lot of shares will also have more weight than a smaller output.
There are 2 problems:
- Shareholders who (intentionally or not) do not mint for a while will have a bigger impact on the vote when they start minting again. This can cause sudden changes in the result of some votes (notably on those calculating medians)
- Shareholders can trade reward for influence. If they choose to have large outputs they will find less blocks but each vote will have more weight. On the long term the difference will be low but on the interval of a vote the impact may be significant.
See the discussion here: Using share days destroyed as vote weight
So I suggest we adopt the following motion:
Starting from Nu protocol V06 all votes will have the same weight, regardless of the amount of shares involved or their age.
It’s generic enough to apply to all votes, including the planned and unplanned ones. Of course a future motion can always override it.
The actual protocol switch time will be decided just before the release of version 0.6.0.
To comply with this new rule the following existing votes will be modified:
- Park rate calculation. Currently the effective park rate is the median of the voted park rates weighted by the share days destroyed. It will be changed to just be the median of the voted park rates.
- Custodian grants. To be elected a custodian must have both 50% of the vote counts and 50% of the share days destroyed. After protocol V06 they will only require 50% of the vote counts.
- Motions. The result of the motions is not actually evaluated by the client because it doesn’t have any direct impact. But the RPC command returns the share days destroyed of each motion. It will be removed and only the percentage of blocks will be returned for each voted motion.
And the following upcoming vote will be changed:
- Minimum fee. The fee was planned to be the median of the fee votes weighted by the share days destroyed. The fee will just be the median of the voted fees.
I did not include all these details in the motion itself because I think the general intent is clear enough. If I missed anything in these details we won’t have to pass another motion.