Multi-Proof Individuality and a Republic Transformation

Governance
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1

Hi,
My name is Timothy McMasters and I am a web developer who has been progressively learning more and more about the crypto space and I absolutely love the technology that is offered by Polkadot. A thought crossed my mind today about the state of Polkadot and the current issues with governance.

  1. 1 DOT = 1 vote heavily favors those with lots of liquidity and small investors who would like to vote have zero incentive to actually vote. This inhibits the overall network growth incentivizing those who are new to leave the chain. I myself have felt this.
  2. Democracy = mob rule(Tyranny of the majority) and coupled with those who have more liquidity, you may find on more than one occasion bad referendums passing because of the ability to buy passing referendums and mob mentality.
  3. Voter Ignorance because you may follow the pack without actually knowing what the ending result of a referendum would cause. This is more apparent in a pure democracy which is the current state of Polkadot if I am correct.

This is by no means a definite list of the issues that lie in the Polkadot network governance.

The solution?

A multi-proof individuality and Republic transformation of the Polkadot ecosystem. If the blockchain was able to prove individuality of one person regardless of the wallet they were using it would be able to allow that person if they were staking Polkadot to be able to 1 vote for their specific region in the world. These regions would then be divided and based off of their active polkadot users be able to contribute and vote on specific referendums that affects the Polkadot ecosystem. Each region would then be taken into account and that regions decision and number of electoral points for that region would be added to the voting weight/direction on which that region voted. The number of active voters for that region would be the potential way you could calculate the amount of electoral votes that region gets.

Individuality could be tied to nfts on a separate layer. Individuality would be a collection of the proofs that the user has provided. This would be obfuscated encrypted like all else on a blockchain be virtually impossible to decrypt and be fully protected. This could be a collection of fingerprint authentication facial recognition and iris scanning. By tying this collection of authentication data to a specific nft on a blockchain we would be able to tie that user to the governance and anywhere they were staking polkadot. This is because you could enforce that anytime they would want to stake polkadot you would have to provide this authentication data. This authentication data would be the data tied to staking incentivize to not have bad behavior and then allow the user to freely vote for their region which would contribute to the overall voting of a referendum. This would continue the incentivization of good behavior staking and polkadot and the ability to actually pass referendums with more active users.

This is totally a high level overview that probably has mistakes in it.

By doing this you would incentivize more users to join the chain because it makes it easier to vote and also incentivizes more users to secure the blockchain by staking their dot.
This would be able to incentivize more regions to bring more users to the polkadot ecosystem to increase their active polkadot users and overall provide more users to the chain growing this immensely.
This would reduce tyranny of the majority since a group of smaller regions can overtake one larger country especially if that larger country is known for bad behavior. Bad behavior known to be following the trend of mob rule because this would incentivize more decentralization across the globe. By turning polkadot into more of a republic rather than a pure democracy you would assist the overall incentives of decentralization and web3.

It’s obviously needs to be more thought through and probably has mistakes in it and misunderstandings, but I hope you gives a good read and provide feedback to me :grin:.

2

I’m unclear what you’re referring to here. Tokens used in OpenGov aren’t at risk.

5

No, tokens used in voting are not lost. You can lock them if you wish (for the conviction multiplier), but even in those cases you get them back when the conviction duration ends.

6

Let me alter my post to account for this update, sorry for the misconception.

1 Like
7

Is this edit better? I am trying to join the discussion and I thought the forum was the best way :slight_smile:

8

More broadly, I have a few comments:

  • Whales only have outsized influence in OpenGov because turnout is so low
  • Token-voting was instituted by design, with the reasoning that the more “skin in the game” a tokenholder has, the more likely they are to vote in ways that redound to to the network’s benefit, since harmful referenda will hurt their asset value more severely
  • OpenGov is still in its infancy, and it’s unsurprising that it hasn’t wobbled its way to an equilibrium (yet?)

There have been many, many posts theorizing alternative voting systems, from quadratic voting (too vulnerable to Sybil attack) to full KYC identity/proof-of-personhood.

Your individuality idea seems to be part of that latter broad category (as does Gavin Wood’s recent talk on individuality). Full KYC will be a hard sell, since anonymity/privacy are core values of many tokenholders.

Proof-of-personhood might be doable, as might proof of individuality, but the devil is in the details, and it’s not an easy problem–it’s easy for someone to say “hey we should do it,” but unless they know how to do it, it’s immaterial imo.

Maybe more importantly, since OpenGov is currently a token-voting system, any change would have to be passed by the tokenholding community and barring a hefty boost in turnout, that means it would require whale support; are whales likely to support a system to reduce their influence? (I am not a whale, but I doubt it.)

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I think whales could be convinced of the right variables proved to provide a positive direction for dot :slight_smile: this was more of a thought experiment rather than a I can do this and more of a could this lead to a better direction for polkadot. If we could derive a system of incredible security and privacy while also proving personhood with biometric data we could avoid issues with this. I will think more about this and if this could be done in a practice sense.

10

I wanted to gauge thoughts and opinions :thinking: