Summary : This proposal is to make the vote equal and not stake weight based.
Background : The governance right now is stake weight based. Currently we have 112 elected validators and the first 17 validators control more than 50% of the total stake.
Motivation : With this proposal, the governance will be more balanced between the different validators. This will improve the decentralization of the governance.
Specification :
Each elected validator will have 1 vote equal to the current EMS (roughly 5.5M currently).
Each eligible unelected validator will have a fraction of a vote (between 0 and 1). This fraction will be calculated relatively to the current EMS. Example: An unelected eligible validator with 2.75M in stake will have 0.5 voting power.
Note: Instead of using vote and fraction of vote we can use the capped stake and stake, it is equivalent.
For a vote to be passed it will require the majority (+51%).
I believe this will be a good thing, it will have to be a simple majority of who ever votes. We have to change the voting rules first then vote on this proposal.
I think passing this resolution is the right thing to do. One head One vote is a basic democratic principle and a positive one for Harmony and the community
This makes absolute sense. This way we level the playing field and every $ONE person’s vote is counted as equally as everyone else’s vote. Regardless of status.
Currently with 3 days left to vote on HIP-8 there are only 80 eligible validators that have voted. This is the most participation in a vote that we have seen (HIP-6 had 73). In the past 5 proposals, we have only seen an average of ~66 eligible validators that have voted.
With 172 eligible validators (Unelected validators can vote), the average of 66 is only 38%.
A proposal needs 51% (down from the original 66%) With Governance being base on stake weight, the 51% requirements are able to be reached.
VOTE NO
Also going to use this opportunity to say that while the first 17 validators control more than 50% of the total stake… It will shock you how many out of that 17 do not vote.
On HIP-6, there were a total of (only) 73 votes. This is the most votes we’ve seen on a closed proposal to date. Out of the top 17 validators based on stake weight 9 of them didn’t even vote. DIDNT. EVEN. VOTE.
Rant: We should be educating the community on UNDELEGATING from validators who do not contribute to the network other than being a validator.
Delegators should be using their delegated ONE as not only a way to help secure the network, but to reward and incentivize validators that contribute to the network by voting.
I can see positives and negatives both ways. On one hand, I don’t want stake centralization to affect future governance. I’m not accusing them of this, but a large delegator like binance could delegate to nodes that agree to vote in their interests, thus controlling how Harmony operates. I see downsides to one vote one validator as well. I’d probably prefer a compromise that might get some yes votes from large validators that would have to vote against themselves having more influence on the protocol. I would suggest something like a weighted voting system where small validators get one vote, midsize get two votes, large get 3 votes and then cap it there. That way there are still advantages for the larger pools, but not so much to where they could throw their weight around to control the protocol. But I’ll vote yes here only because I think it’s preferable to doing nothing and having it negatively affect Harmony
I feel this issue is a bit for complex than this. It would have been interesting to attempt 2 avenues of voting, not unlike the senate and house of representatives in the U.S… with added checks and balances to prevent future corruption
Bringing down the number of votes for our early validators can be detrimental if bad actors decide to create and elect validators for the sole purpose of casting these votes maliciously.
Conversely this can be done if the number of staked tokens is the determinant of how many votes can be cast by a validator.
Both of these can be accomplished with money and coordination. How to make this prohibitively expensive or to have other programmed, appointed, or elected checks and balances would be worth thinking into.
The building corruption in the US could be studied to see how checks and balances can work, and how they can go awry. The future must be scrubbed of the possibility of the consolidation of power to a few.
My only issue is this will need to cut out unelected validators from voting. If we allow elected unelected validators to vote in a 1 vote per validator mechanism, anyone can spin up many validators to swing a vote and very quickly too. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Thank you for your proposal. Do you happen to have any examples of other proof of stake networks where each validator has a single vote? I’d be curious to know how that’s working.
If a validator with 5M ONE staked and 1 delegator has the same voting power as a validator with 200M ONE staked and 2,400 delegates, is that really a solution or just a bigger problem? That creates an opportunity for a large validator with high self-stake to split their delegation to create new validators and gain more votes than other validators who don’t or can’t redelegate their validator’s stake to create new validators.
It’s hard for Validator.ONE to support the proposal as-is, but we’re happy to continue the discussion and would like to see an example of single votes working on other chains.
I’m against equal voting, instead of this I rather see some bands!
Just a thought and not written in stone;
Band 1: Not elected - 1 BLSKey = 1 vote
Band 2: 2 - 10 BLSkey = 2 votes
Band 3: 11 and more BLSkey = 3 votes
This way some bigger ones will have more skin in the game (as they should have), but it also takes away the need of non-participating bigger validators. Let 's be honest, the Binance and KuCoins will not vote on these proposals, you can have an opinion if they should, but not likely is going to happen!
At risk of contradicting my stance on simplifying things for delegators, I think it would be a nice feature to see voting activity on the staking dashboard for each validator.
Something like: proposals voted on / eligible to vote on
Eligible to vote on being the number of proposals created since the validators creation epoch
While I agree with the sentiment of this proposal in this thread, I have to agree with ElCapitan here.
With the proposed system, governance would not work as we would be even further away from required votes to pass. Even more so if the topic would be more controversial of nature where the opinion is split further apart.
That said, I do agree that something should be done to further improve the voting process. The step to lowering required votes helped, as now we’re not so dependant on the major league validators’ votes. How to streamline and make the voting process better and more fair? That’s something I can’t figure out right of the bat. However, to educate users in a way or another and to make them interested in governance would be a great first step - now staking is only seen as a way of making profit.
Voted no here, as with the direct proposal it would make governance voting even harder than what it is right now. This could potentially be abused too, because if everyone has the same amount of votes (i.e. 1), anyone could just spin up extra validators and vote to skew the results in their favor, since unelected validators can vote, too.
EDIT: Just noticed the original suggestion had included only elected validators. I don’t think this is reasonable either, as there’s often times where near to election being validators that are active within the community could be left out. Somehow in my mind I took this original suggestion as including both elected and unnelected, as it is right now - however, with the current system the impact of unelected (or us small validators) is negligible.
$ONE validator needs to exist in good standing for {x} many blocks
One person has one vote, no matter their socioeconomic status
$ONE validator has one vote no matter their size
A majority is needed to for a candidate to win (in most cases), but this is the majority of votes for a choice out of {all whom voted - not majority of all possible voters}
A majority of votes from all voting $ONE validators dictates outcome (perhaps harmonaunts can do better than governments currently do in incentivizing turnout. If a validator was required to vote to remain or become elected, that might change things, etc.)
A criminal cannot vote while incarcerated nor once reformed for a period of time (ideally, but uniformly in practice)
A $ONE validator cannot vote if currently, or for {x} number of blocks after, being penalized
Point is that if decentralization is akin to democracy, is there a need to reinvent the wheel or are there some parallels that may be adopted and/or augmented from existing structures.
I like the idea of changing the voting mechanics, but cannot vote yes as the proposal is currently defined in HIP-12
I have noted all your concerns, let me try to resume all of them:
Unelected eligible validator (like us currently) are excluded
We won’t have enough vote power to pass a vote
We should consider the number of delegations
The bigger validators should still have more power
A big validator can create new validators to gain more voting power
Here are the solutions/answers I found:
Each elected validator will have 1 vote equal to the current EMS (roughly 5.3M currently).
Each eligible unelected validator will have a fraction of a vote (between 0 and 1). This fraction will be calculated relatively to the current EMS. So an unelected eligible validator with 2.65M in stake will have 0.5 voting power.
Note: Instead of using vote and fraction of vote we can use the capped stake and stake, it is the same thing.
With this system, we will have enough voting power to pass a vote, there are 110 elected validators (+ a few eligible unelected), so we will need a bit more than 56 vote to pass a vote (hip 6 had 73 votes with 65 elected validator and hip 8 had 85 with 72 elected). It will work even better than with the current system because smaller validators are in general more active and currently a lot of big stake are not voting making it harder to reach the 51%.
While this looks like a good idea, I’m afraid we cannot rely on the number of delegations because there is no KYC etc., and it is too easy to divide a delegation into multiple small ones.
Maybe. This will break the initial idea of the vote equality but I can understand some of your arguments in favor on this. I am open for further discussion on this.
Yes, a high stake validator will have the possibility to split his stake, but this will just give him the same power as it is currently, so I don’t think this is a valid argument against this proposal.
If a high stake validator splits his stake, he will have to create new nodes, he will have less control over the election, this will benefit in the decentralization compared to what we have now.
I will edit the initial post with the new idea I had to include the unelected validators.
Before doing that I want to give you a bit more time to continue the discussion and get your feedbacks.
we deserve balanced voting 