Validator DAO Council Q1 2022 Candidate: CoinChowder

Governance Validator DAO
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G’day mates!

Chowder here, You probably don’t know much about me since I’m a pretty small validator, but thanks for clicking in and showing interest!

I’m going to be honest here. I am putting in my candidacy here because I want to volunteer my time and services for Harmony. So, if I make it, that’s great, I won’t disappoint you. If I don’t make it, that’s fine, I won’t be disappointed because the other candidates are fantastic assets to Harmony.

About me:

I’m 35, a father of a 2 year old boy and pretty much an introverted meme-ster. I make memes out of everything and have a pretty lame, tongue in cheek, sense of humour. I’ve found my place in Harmony’s community because no matter how lame my jokes, there’s someone who appreciates it. Now that’s what I call… Harmony. Ba Dum Tss

I don’t come from a technical background so I think I’m a living example that anyone can do anything in the crypto space as long as they have the determination and willpower.

I’m just your average guy and have been on probably the same right of passage (below) like most others.

Phase 1: Try to get rich through leveraged trading and get burnt

Phase 2: Become an ‘investor’ and buy and hodl crypto

Phase 3: Fall in love with Harmony and start staking off exchanges.

Phase 4: Consider starting a validator, but still not 100% committed.

Phase 5: Take the leap of faith, start a validator with the help of the awesome community.

Phase 6: Think about ways of contributing more to the protocol, and put yourself up for election in the VDAO.

No matter which phase you’re in right now, rest assured that you will have all the technical, operational, and even emotional support from the community. It will be intimidating at first, with a steep learning curve but honestly, you will be in great hands. I cannot stress that enough.

I hosted a game “ Harmony Battleships” on Twitter with a lot of success, jumping from unelected to elected before the series ended. I am about to run a series of mini-games to keep delegators engaged and also incentivize them to remain staked. I believe there are things we can do to make it fun for delegators too.

Anyways, I’m starting to ramble. Thank you for your time reading this.

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Not as unknown as you think!!

Great to see your candidacy and good luck…

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Harmony Battleships was a ton of fun! You have a great ability to think outside of the box.

Great to see you applied and best wishes on the election.

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Supporting me from the start, setting up my node, participating in battleships, and now my candidacy. I can’t imagine my Harmony experience without you, my dude.

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Twitter Space AMA

Give those listening a brief overview of the VDAO mandates and what each one means for the network:

The 3 mandates being Decentralisation (yes, we Aussies spell it with a ’s’), Security and Participation.

Decentralisation means that the voting power needs to be spread out. To do this, the bootstrap initiative means that we as a protocol can make it as easy as possible for validators to join and power the network. There are so many people who are willing to contribute their time and money to help Harmony grow. I have seen too many validators finish setting up their nodes but end up closing it down as they cannot secure enough stake.

In terms of security, I’m not going to pretend that I’m an expert in this field. However I believe the more elected validators and encouraging delegators to diversify their stake would definitely help secure the network. The other aspect of security is how validator nodes secure their infrastructure. This is an area I would like to give Coinkin aka HankTheCrank a shoutout because every validator he has helped, he would always give advice on how to ensure there is enough security to protect the validator node.

Finally, participation. This, to me, is one of the most important roles of the Validator DAO. People like Maffaz or Farmony One spend so much of their time reaching out to validators to spark discussion on how to improve the process, draft out professionally written proposals and remind forgetful people (like myself) to vote.

As a first time candidate, please tell those listening, what do you feel will be your greatest contribution to the VDAO and, if elected, what are you looking forward to most in term3.

Well one of my strengths is that I make pretty good decisions, able to communicate effectively and be objective about (most) things. I’m just really good at supporting initiatives and delivering things effectively and efficiently, be it nagging validators to vote, or coming up with new out of the box ideas that may be useful to the protocol. The keyword of the question being “IF” elected. I put my hat into the ring in case there weren’t enough people wanting to contribute their time to support the network. If the community feel there are better candidates out there for the Validator DAO, I’m perfectly fine with that. My main objective for nominating myself is that Harmony will have a solid/reliable character who can support the other 8 in the team. That’s actually what I’d be looking forward to the most. I’d get to dive a bit deeper into the rabbit hole of Harmony ONE and it’s DAOs.

What do DAO’s mean to you and why is participating in governance of the validator community important to you?

DAOs are significant to me, because we are often involuntarily put into, or born into situations where we have no choice but to follow the rules set by a bunch of people who preceded us. DAOs give the power back to the people to really have a true democracy and steer things in a direction which has the majority of the voting people satisfied. Sometimes we are tricked into a sense of ‘democracy’ because we get to vote on who to represent us, but the pool of candidates you can vote for come from a governing entity. To me, that is fake democracy.

Well, we run validator nodes because we want Harmony to grow and become decentralised (again, ’s’). If we don’t participate in governance and voice our opinions, well, then it’s kind of counteracts that effort, imo.

Thanks for listening. This was fun :slight_smile:

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