Voting incentive

[irritant]

Was wondering about the voting incentive, somewhere I read there are plans to improve the incentive to vote by punishing shareholders who don’t vote (can’t find it now, search function seems to be malfunctioning). What I understand from an youtube video explaining this: you can vote for motions, and if you are against it, you do not vote. I don’t exactly know how the voting would be increased when shareholders are not in favor of some motion, they would not vote because that is the same as voting against it, but when not voting is also punished, shareholders would be punished if they want to vote against some motion. I hope I misunderstood something, maybe there should be the ability to actively vote against motions, so it would be able to increase the incentive for shareholders that don’t vote, instead of only the option to vote for something/not vote.

[Ben]

I don’t exactly know how the voting would be increased when shareholders are not in favor of some motion, they would not vote because that is the same as voting against it, but when not voting is also punished, shareholders would be punished if they want to vote against some motion.

Solving a block without casting a vote for a motion, parking rate, custodial grant, is similar in effect to casting a “no” vote.

If a shareholder is minting, they are casting (or not casting) votes – this isn’t the problem that the original topic was meant to address. The incentive discussion is centered on those shareholders that do not attempt to mint.

To be clear, there are no adverse effects for not minting, today (other than not being able to cast a vote and not benefiting from the block reward), the discussions have been academic at this point.

[irritant]

I see, thanks for clarifying, so minting is the most important

[Ben]

Absolutely. This is an improvement over the “traditional” proof of stake minting scheme, at least to me. With other proof of stake systems, the act of minting is used to secure the block chain, but other than the finanical reward provided when you solve a block, whether an individual holder decides to mint or not is affected by the “tragedy of the commons”. For an extreme example:

Alice, a PoS coin holder thinks to herself:

Why should I waste time and effort trying to mint a block, when there are plenty of other people out there doing the same thing? I’ll just hang out and let Bob take care of it…

While at the same time, Bob is making his decision…

Alice and everyone else seem to have this minting thing taken care of. I don’t really care about the 1% reward, because it’s not going to change my situation very much…

End result: The block chain is not secure.

With Nu, the grant proposals, motions, and parking rates have a large impact on the day-to-day operations of the network, and as such, for a holder not to want to cast their votes can have a much larger impact finanical impact on their holdings than mearly not getting their block reward.

It’s not a perfect system, because some people will still decide not to vote even with all of the implications, but I feel it is a lot closer to a positive set of incentives than a pure monetary reward.