How many times in life you have seen one shit replaced for another shit? Especially in politics. Change one government, the next one is even worse. People get desperate and lose faith.
Here we are in this new environment of ours with all this new fancy technology. Something to be excited for!
We have a very exciting event right now on the Steem Blockchain. Challenge for the Blockchain governance.
The top crypto portals are all talking about the DPoS and PoS governance and its faults. I have seen a few of them. But all the talks seem form high, without getting into the weeds. No details. Just the general talk.
We don’t need to replace one evil for the next. We need to put in place a system that will incentivize and promote good behavior and leadership.
I have a post on Blockchain Governance Models | Should Steem Governance Model Be Changed? looking into the existing models, options, pro and cons.
DPoS is at some level sacrificing decentralization for speed and efficiency.
In the Steem case, even with the larger stakeholder assets, Steem is still one of the most decentralized Blockchains with 20% share of the no.1 stakeholder, 3% share on the second one and 1.5% share on the third one. This is mainly thanks to its Proof of Brain inflation distribution model that continues to redistribute the assets.
From all the debate in the last week I hear these things:
Should we achieve this by just changing the actors or by making systematic changes to the Blockchain that will be there for every actor now and in the future.
I totally agree with this point.
The most obvious solution to me for this is One Stake, One Vote. This brings more decentralization but also less efficiency, as it will be hard for the top witnesses to agree on things and make changes. I’m open for this number to be between 1 and 5.
If we have this rule, the Steemit Inc stake wouldn’t not be able to change the top witnesses. Knowing this it will be no point for them to use it at all, and just bring bad reputation to them. One thing solved.
Now this is a bit controversial, but I do see the logic behind it.
How to achieve this? One thing that is mentioned is the SPS. There can be two funds here.
Onboarding. There can be a fund for new users, giving them delegations and free accounts.
Development. This will be the general fund for any SPS proposals that will be voted.
How much of the Steemit Inc stake should end up here? This is totally hypothetical but let’s say somewhere between 10% to 30%. By doing this, they will be free from any further moral or ethical obligations to the community.
This one is also a bit trickier. How to prevent exchanges from voting without them perceive this as a threat and hostility? With the 13 weeks powerdown period Steem had some indirect mechanism for this. We see now this is not enough and can be exploited. Although it is extremely rare. As for the most there are probably more solution to this. One that has been mentioned is some sort of cooling period, meaning that when a new stake is powered up some time needs to pass before it is eligible for voting. Something around one to three months. If an exchange power up, people will notice it. Also maybe implement more weight to the stake that is being locked up longer.
If all the above criteria are met, witnesses don’t need to freeze funds in any situation. I can tell the technicality of this, but this means that we need some sort of coded in mechanism that will prevent freezing stake. One possible solution is to seek for a larger consensus on this. Let’s say the top 50 for action like this. If this was the case, the freeze that happened wouldn’t be able as we now for sure that there was witnesses against in the top 50. With more decentralization in witness voting, the low witness ranks will be easily achievable, so the smaller players will have say in this.
All the best
