[Peershares] Apathetic Voting Body

[Nagalim]

This question appears simple and straight forward:
If minting a peershare is highly profitable, is there a large likelihood of opportunistic voters who just buy to mint and do not vote or participate in data feeds? If so, does that spell doom for the peershare?

An apathetic voting body could cause motions to take a long time to pass, or freeze the process all together. In theory, this will cause the price to drop, which will cause the opportunistic holders to sell, hopefully to people that are less apathetic. However, as the price goes back up again (I’m talking time scales like years), those same apathetic voters will again purchase and mint. This appears to cause something of a limit to both share price and efficiency of the voting process.

I am very interested to hear what others have to say about this hypothetical phenomenon.

[Chronos]

I think this happens. Bitshares has faced this challenge, since its security model, DPOS, has nodes that are permitted to mint voted in by an (apathetic) voting body of shareholders. It has become gradually more difficult to be elected as a Bitshares delegate, because voters have become more apathetic over time. It’s sometimes even difficult to vote out a nonfunctional delegate.

I haven’t seen this become a serious issue in NuBits, which is the most prominent Peershares implementation so far.

Interestingly, something like this happens in world democracies, too. Voters become apathetic, and inferior leaders get elected. (Not quite the same phenomenon, but hey, it’s something to think about.)

[dysconnect]

I think data-feed subscription gives an impression that more voters are active than reality; I remember there was a big jump in votes for the spread motion after it was put into @cybnate’s data feed. This is similar to what happens with DPOS. The monthly custodian voting for the many separate TLLPs could introduce some amount of fatigue as well.

[Nagalim]

I still love this solution:

Ternary Voting Concept

The frequency based approach in general allows for an auto-voting system that does not rely on data feeds. This can be established by performing a weighted linear combinations over the voting of the last N blocks and to combine this with the own voting, if any exists. The weights of the signers can automatically be trained by making use of their derivatives and your own voting preferences, such that over time you will adapt to other signers when you don’t have a motion in your list. The model would be a so called spiking neural network, a comparably well studied model from pattern recognition.

[Sentinelrv]

I believe I’ve heard @JordanLee speak before about having a selection of data feeds readily available that can be chosen upon installing the client and trying to mint NuShares. People wouldn’t need to go through the extra effort of searching for a data feed they like and adding it. They’d have a bunch of feeds listed (maybe based on popularity or some other categorization) that they could choose from in case they didn’t want to place votes manually themselves. This would hopefully make things a lot easier for apathetic shareholders and prevent the situation you describe.

Even then it’s possible that people won’t bother to pick one from the list and skip this step. In this case I think a feed should automatically be chosen by default and you would need to disable the feed in settings if you wanted to place votes manually yourself. This would help ensure that somebody always has a feed running, or they’ve chosen to manually set votes.

[Nagalim]

As far as I understand, the basic concept of frequency voting is very easy to implement (just use any old random number generator to decide whether to vote or not) and the ‘average vote’ feed would be a reasonably simple analysis of the recent blockchain.

If we were to pass a motion, would the Nu Team feel confident implementing frequency voting in the standard client?

I think use of the recent voter history is much more fail proof than choosing a centralized data feed by default. I’ll do an extreme example with 80% of minters apathetic

Situation A: Default Feed
80% of voters are on the default feed. The vote has essentially come down to whether or not the person running the feed pushes the vote forward.

Situation B: Frequency Voting
80% of the voters are doing what the other 20% are doing. The vote has come down to whether or not that 20% can attain a majority yes vote amongst themselves and the rest of the voting body will follow.

[tomjoad]

A tangential discussion occurred here as well: Block reward system

Interestingly, something like this happens in world democracies, too. Voters become apathetic

It’s a good point. In the thread I linked above I suggested that if the voting system is crippled by politicized forces (of which I could argue that “The Apathetics” could constitute a voting party), a transition to first-past-the-post might need to occur.

Block reward system

I see the future of Nu as being one that has politicized data feeds that collect voters with similar economic beliefs. It will allow the network to more efficiently make decisions, provided the data feeds don’t reject all motions/custodians they didn’t introduce. As I’ve mentioned in the past, should that occur the Nu network would need to transition to fixed-schedule elections with a slate of motions, proposals, and custodians, and a “first-past-the-post” voting system. But, either way, I think data feeds are here to stay - and once enough quality feeds are automatically enabled in the client, the problem of “no” votes largely disappears.

Eliminating the mint reward or reducing it to 1 NSR could be a good idea too. Not only would it discourage empty votes, it would actually lead to an increasing NSR share price (especially if we vote for higher NSR transaction fees).

[Dhume]

[quote=“tomjoad, post:7, topic:2504, full:true”]
A tangential discussion occurred here as well: Block reward system

Interestingly, something like this happens in world democracies, too. Voters become apathetic

It’s a good point. In the thread I linked above I suggested that if the voting system is crippled by politicized forces (of which I could argue that “The Apathetics” could constitute a voting party), a transition to first-past-the-post might need to occur. [/quote]

From what i understand people that don’t vote actually vote no against the current motion.This is vastly different from what happens in world democracies where one only needs a majority of actual votes cast. Abstained votes aren’t no votes like with the Nushare model. Hence one needs a lot more votes in favor of a motion in the Nushare model than it would take percentage votes to win an election in a world democracy.

[mhps]

Eliminating the mint reward or reducing it to 1 NSR could be a good idea too.

That endangers the security of the network by disincentivise minting in a POS network.

[Nagalim]

@mhps beat me to the punch.

Eliminating the mint reward or reducing it to 1 NSR

My only issue with this is that a wider spread PoS network is more secure. If we could harness those opportunists to help secure the blockchain while still maintaining integrity of the voting process, it would be ideal.

The frequency voting system seems to attain this ideal. The biggest issue I can find with it is that if the apathetic voting body is some very large percent, like 99.9%, then if someone votes incorrectly that incorrect vote could be magnified throughout the system via random chance and could wind up being passed. However, if less than 1% of the stake holders care about the outcome of the peershare fork it’s probably not destined to survive anyway.

[masterOfDisaster]

That endangers the security of the network by disincentivise minting in a POS network.

For educated minters the biggest “reward” for minting should be the chance to decide the fate of their property.
So even 0 NSR reward (or a negative “reward”!) could be ok.
Only I don’t know to force education
…looking at the world this seems to be some challenge…

[masterOfDisaster]

However, if less than 1% of the stake holders care about the outcome of the peershare fork it’s probably not destined to survive anyway

This hits the nail on the head!

[mhps]

For educated minters the biggest “reward” for minting should be the chance to decide the fate of their property.So even 0 NSR reward (or a negative “reward”!) could be ok.

There are choices of hundreds of other cryptos. POS coins are easy to setup a duplicate network. Less incentive just increases the chance of people moving away.

[Nagalim]

If we were giving regular dividends things might be different, but right now I think you’re very right. I personally feel an incentive to mint BKS solely for the mint reward (though the chance to vote feels super good too). If anything, I was kind of hoping we’d increase the mint reward.

[masterOfDisaster]

POS coins are easy to setup a duplicate network.

You might be able to fork Nu.
You will not be able to fork the community, the business partners, the experience of the dev team, the track record, etc.
Nu is a DAC being operated on a blockchain. You might be able to copy the blockchain, but that doesn’t mean you copied Nu
The incentive to mint AND vote should be to sustain and evolve Nu. For NSR holders this could be a decent incentive.

[mhps]

You will not be able to fork the community,

We are talking about a portion of the community that don’t vote. You can duplicate that part easily with any POS coin !

Plus, communities can and do split.