Recently RDX is ramping up the work on researching and then creating the first concepts/proposals for a governance system for the Radix Public Network.
Do you think it will be something like what we are already experiencing with Kepler and the cosmos universe, or something different and more innovative?
I’m not familiar with Kepler and Cosmos style of governance? Any links or info on that?
I’ve always appreciated that Radix treats governance as a ‘hard problem’ and not something trivial or easy to implement. I hope they can find someone very good to take on their governance research position, although I doubt there’s a large pool of qualified applicants for that kind of position.
At the unlock debates it was prudent to have 1 vote per KYC’d individual although that also put some people off as they are against KYC in principle. Perhaps if decentralised ID is ever figured out that would change that system.
The other problem is of course whales overdetermining votes and only acting in their interest and not necessarily the interest of the network. Quadratic voting is of course helpful here, but perhaps there is more that could be done too?
A combination of some sort of balanced weighting of decentralised ID with 1 person =1 vote and also token-weighted votes, tempered by quadratic voting could work?
Another question would be is vote delegation helpful?
Depending on how often votes are, how technical the issues are and time consuming it might be to be informed on the relevant issues it may make sense to allow vote delegation to trusted individuals?
This could also apply to only some more technical matters like Radix Improvement Proposals (are we calling these RIPs? - has there been any official naming of this yet?) where the average token holder may not be familiar with the technical background to make an educated vote.
I cited the Cosmos ecosystem simply because it was the first that came to my mind, since I think that in this early stage of radix development, making comparison is the best way to develop and learn from others strong points and weaknesses.
The Cosmos network is not only a Proof of Stake blockchain network but also one that utilizes on-chain governance. Moreover, thinking about Cosmos, I noticed that the Hub API is really great, open source, public and anyone can really use it. This means anyone can technically create Cosmos v2 or Cosmos v3 blockchain and so on. I was thinking about something with Radix, with community members coordinating formally on-chain and informally off-chain to participate in discussions and debates surrounding the trade-offs of specific changes.
A further question is what kind of decisions do we expect governance to cover?
The kinds of issues/questions seems to me to have a big impact on what kind of governance is appropriate
This is a good point to debate on.
Making another comparison with other governances like Cosmos or Polkadot, what’s different with Radix is that Because the Radix network (both betanet and mainnet) will have a fixed validator set size of 100 (quality more than quantity is always good, I think), there must be some choice made for who runs validators during the betanet period. Radix’s priority in choosing betanet validators will be to give node-running experience to those who are “the MOST LIKELY to be selected as validators on mainnet, and provide HIGH-QUALITY validator service to the network”.
In the article I hyperlinked above it is also said that:
[…] To try to identify and highlight the best possible potential validators, and ensure they get node-running experience on betanet, we would like to gather open proposals from anyone who is committed to being a Radix validator node-runner. […] To provide the best security and performance of mainnet, we believe the community should choose to delegate their stake to multiple validator node-runners who meet these criteria.
In addition to this, I don’t know if it’s linked to what you are saying, but here surfing the Radix blog I found some interesting insights from an old article about virtual voting and how radix is trying to solve this issue.
It was probably necessary for RDX Works to select betanet noderunners, but that’s because it’s a bootstrapping period for the network as it begins.
It’s a point of centralisation for sure, but it’s unrealistic to expect full decentralisation from the outset - no crypto has had this, not even BTC. What is important is that decentralisation increases over time. This should apply to token distribution and governance.
The article on virtual voting seems to refer to consensus voting, not governance voting?
Yes, you’re right, my bad. I’m just trying to deepen this topic so as to put more and more pieces together lol. About governance voting there’s also this interesting interview.
Yeah that’s a good interview, I must listen to it again soon!
I think one thing will be creating tools for a grassroots & bottom up development of sub-governing institutions. Think DAOs of any size with their own identity and authority systems etc. then, these unique DAOs form informal and formal connections with other DAO’s etc and you start building up decentralized networks that can then be leveraged to assign voting rights and also to discretely disseminate information (such as needing to discuss a security bug and get support to fix it without broadcasting to the public that the network is vulnerable. Or at least delay the broadcast until the solution is developed, vetted and likely to gain quick social consensus and then adoption by validators)
It is cool how - in many senses - governance, democracy, and identity are strictly correlated. Structuring
communication architectures anchored on decentralized, privacy preserving, self sovereign identity protocols that can reach all humans having a wifi can open the path for new, radically participative peer-to-peer political movements and economies.
Interesting also that you are mentioning DAOs. Regarding this, my opinion is that their role will be vital in the development of an healthy governance. This mainly because in contrast to the majority of smart contracts, which serve strictly financial purposes, DAOs are highly likely to entail human decision-making in their functioning. Thus, their activities may be thought of as ‘human entropy’, observable on-chain.
Yup. On chain consensus for security is widely discussed, but the software can be utilized to create new mechanisms for arriving at social consensus.