2 Ideas to fix the poll system.
Hello,
One of the big concerns currently in the community is the way polls are lopsided by whales. There's some basic principles in democracy that should never be ignored.
- Everyone who is an adult of voting age gets a vote.
- Your vote isnt worth more or less then your neighbor's.
Obviously there are other principles that are important but for the sake of this discussion, they are a bit irrelevant.
What has been observed for a while is that polls are completely irrelevant, when the top 2 voters have more voting share then the rest of the community, you just cant consider this democratic in any form. Now there are some ways that people who are wealthier can participate in democracy in a more meaningful manner then poorer people. The Koch brothers in the United States come to mind. And whether you agree with Citizen United or not isnt really the point (I'm personally against, there's a limitation of $100 in contribution per year in Québec and the world hasnt stopped moving.)
If you are an active part of the community you've already heard the reason why we cant make it 1 vote per wallet. If we do, whales will just make more wallets and vote using 2000 wallets instead of voting with 1.
Based on the fact that 1 user = 1 vote, there's a very simple solution in my mind that would reduce significantly this issue, I'm not saying it would eliminate 100% of it but between this solution and the work required to vote using hundreds if not thousands of wallets, I think we can eliminate most of it.
My solution is simple. Increase the fee per vote to 1 GRC. 1 GRC is low enough that users with small wallets can pay for it using faucets or even grunching on a phone to pay for it but it's also high enough that should someone actually make 2000 wallets to vote, they would in fact be paying a hefty sum per poll. Obviously the specifics can be discussed.
Requirements to start a poll
Another issue with polls is the difficulty to start one. Based on current rules, it requires 100k GRC to be able to start a poll. I've been crunching for almost 3 month and I only have about 4k GRC earned in that period. As a person who is actively crunching, I wont be able to start a poll unless I buy GRC before 2026. This is absolutely ridiculous in my mind.
I think 10k would be a much better requirement. I'm willing to wait a year before I can start a poll, that's reasonable.
Or as an alternative, perhaps we could make it so that Magnitude is taken into account as a multiplier to your balance. Let's say that for every 10 magnitude, the value of your wallet increased. Starting from 0 to 10 magnitude, someone would have 100% of their value as GRC, their value would increase by 100% per 10 magnitude beyond that so at 11 to 20 magnitude someone with a balance of 4k GRC would have a value of 8k for polls, at 100 magnitude they would have a value 40k, etc.
What do you guys think of this idea?
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The outsize influence of whales is a big problem. Maybe the right answer is to place a cap on the effective shares, so that if a wallet has more than, say 500k GRC, the shares for the balance portion would be limited to 500k GRC. we would obviously need a vote on that (with all of the problems that entails).
The idea of shares following balances, or balance + magnitude, is based in the fact that voting power should follow the amount of “skin in the game”.
Folks that have a lot invested in GRC should have more say than someone with a very low GRC holding.
I like the idea of including magnitude as part of the qualification for creating a poll. There is already a well defined formula in the code to compute the share value for magnitude.
I am not sure whether increasing the fees to vote is really going to make much difference, and I don’t believe a whale would bother to create 1000 wallets to trick the system in a massive way. It is too much trouble.
putting heavy fees on voting does not stop the superiority of whales. Neither in the US presidential elections nor Gridcoin. It just makes voting less appealing for poor folks.
The Koch brothers dont have more votes then you do. They have more money to influence people's mind but that's entirely different
A charge would discourage low balance users from voting, something that we should try to avoid. However I think creating a poll should incur some type of fee so we don't encourage poll spam. Maybe 500 GRC? And minimum balance of 25k to 100k GRC.
Whales could still get around most countermeasures by splitting their wallets. And there is no real need to alienate them anyways, they have a right to vote with their coins. I don't think punishing any whale is the answer. Whales have the most to lose if GRC goes downhill.
The magnitude idea is the most interesting IMO but could give a lot of power to pomegranate/pool operators.
I think that polls should also display what the actual percentage of wallets voted for because right now it only displays what shares voted for and that's a tad misleading.
In principle the increased vote cost sounds reasonable, I know there are some technical reasons why magnitude is used in polls to maintain the integrity of the polling process. Developers will need to join this discussion to clarify the practicality of separating magnitude from polls.
There is currently a poll related to poll creation costs, if anyone missed the discussion it is on redit: https://www.reddit.com/r/gridcoin/comments/83pzpd/poll_decreasing_grc_holding_limit_to_make_a_poll/
The poll is active until April 1st.
I gave my answer to that poll already but yes everyone should vote for every poll. I cant wait until the new UI is implemented and it actually shows that there are active polls. If it could keep track of which poll you voted for or not, it would be even better.
A balance cap cannot be the screw that we adjust as long as the vote weight is combined balance+magnitude.
jringo posted https://steemit.com/gridcoin/@jringo/a-brief-overview-of-vote-weight and from that you get that 1 Mag is worth 5.67 GRC in vote weight. I don't know how this number came up. For me the average between 70:30 and 90:10 is 80:20 but this is how today's vote weight is made up.
To get the power over polls away from whales we should be putting more weight into the magnitude. This way more voting power gets into the hands of boinc crunchers.
An important factor here is: GRC is inflationary, Magnitude is not. This means the vote weight ration GRC:Mag needs to be adjusted every once in a while either way.
I think we need a fresh poll for the vote weight. Maybe the 50:50 option gets more votes from the crunchers this time.
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STOPOMG I could not say this better and have voiced similar opinions , for example the ODLK whitelist approval and whine a whale __ dutch __ on the first vote round turned it from a YES @ 86% and no @ 24% with 1 vote to a 64% no 36% YES and then the person whom contacted the project had them go out of their way to setup SSL for HTTPS even though its only used for the website and you logging into your user and the Boinc client itself does not use SSL to contact the project and get work units same with when it sends them back and uploads them. Additionally he helped them translate their site from Russian , since science HAS to be in English only for Boinc/Gridcoin and the whitelist and we do not have plugins for our web browsers to translate to another language ( mine must be defunct since it does it automatically for me ) although we have a #gridcoin-german and #gridcoin-sweedish channels on freenode and they do not speak or seem to understand English... Then after they took the time to do that ( hell if they got paid like the Gridcoin dev's for their time holy cow that would have been a nice payout ) Although I was so kind enough to copy and paste from my browser the projects webpage in English on the initial vote info on cryptocointalk it HAD to be in English by default because __ dutch __ REALLY wanted to crunch it and he could not
understand it enough to run it. Then we had vote round 2 to whitelist it and his whale vote did not swing it to a NO he showed there is no integrity and honor in our leadership and whined and bitched and cried like a little baby to whitelist a project that did not exist when the polls were both created ODLK1 because he wanted to dedicate his 3.8kilowatts of Boinc crunching it and not ODLK and his whale whine won and instead of the project on the application to be whitelisted ODLK the project that did not even at the time have a DNS entry and was a bare IP only ODLK1 was whitelisted after days of fighting with the person whom found and contacted the project in the first place and guess what??? He did a hit and run , crunching the project that he cared so much about for less than a week. The reason why? Because he wanted the initial whitelist massive magnatude boost , few users equals massive magnitude. So he just did a hit and run and has abandoned the project. Whales and what I call the GRC8 control and manipulate everything to their agenda and we do not matter. It does not matter that they are head of IT for a company or University and install Boinc on machines that do not belong to them violating the TOS of both Boinc and Gridcoin let alone comment human ethics or ethics. I have been crunching almost a year and a half and have a massive not average setup using an HP C-3000 blade enclosure and a mix of BL-460 and BL-480 blades and a plethora of laptops along with AMD 9590 ( current back in its retail box ) and have earned 20k GRC from crunching and around 3000 for attending the bi-weekly mumble sessions when we used to get paid to attend. So your 4k GRC is actually pretty good considering there are people with less and are happy with a mag of 4 and earning 3-4grc a month. I keep saying we need to form a real actual Gridcoin Foundation with checks and balances so that whales do not control everything and your voice , my voice , his voice and her voice all matter the same no matter how much of a users trust fund they spend initially investing cash into Gridcoin. There are users whom actually pay all of their bills monthly , mortgage and car payments along with all of their bills with the Gridcoin they earn monthly. There is a reason that the value of Gridcoin is tanking and you seem to notice and see in plain sight the same BS i have seen and when voice I was shunned and banned from the community and yes i did say derogatory and vulgar things , but in my defense the GRC8 already via their private Slack channel already wanted me gone for pointing out things like you just have so watch out. If you see security issues in the code or unethical practice and point it out you will not be around for long. Yes I am sorry for the vulgar and derogatory things I said it was wrong , I was wrong and I as in the wrong to step down to the level of the whales like NeuralMiner and of our non Boinc crunching leader Customminer and I am sorry , I should have been the better person and walked away and I advise you to do the same if you want to stick around. You are just supposed to zip your lips and shut the hell up if you want to be a part of the " Team " because Gridcoin is a sham and cult following and there is no " Teamwork " and everybody is out for themselves and if they can hack or do something sneaky and get paid more for it , its going to be done whale or not along with the handful of us Greyhat's involved in the community. Look back to July when the Gridcoin network was hacked and what evolved from that. I advise you keep quite and shut up and sit down , they want us to be good little peons and that is why the value of Gridcoin is tanking because the truth comes out and as more people read posts like your post her and my comments and obviously I do not hold back the value is going to continue to drop until the project dies and I do not see it living much longer with the current model of ethics. Thank you for you post , I commend you for saying something and pointing out the rigged Donald Trump style community of Gridcoin we currently have , I wish it was like a family we do not all have to get along or like each other but we should be working together and making it better and fixing BS like 100k to make a vote and trust fund kiddies running everything and whine a whales controlling how things work and function. $48,000 USD paid to the Dev's since ThomasB our head dev hacked the network and because head dev and over 1000 hours and we still have a crappy client that does not function 100% and a linux client that does not have the neural network , only windows. Hell we cant even get the all the damn current features to work let alone they get paid $30hr to fix errors in code they wrote incorrectly in the first place and get pain another $30hr to fix it and since they control the votes are going to get $60hr to screw up and fix their own mistakes over and over. Shame on Gridcoin , Shame on our leadership. Berkeley needs to look into Gridcoin and keep and eye on it and put the dev's in check or drop it completely from interfacing with their code.
This rant was unappropriate. I do not know about dutch's intentions so I can and will not comment on that part. What I know is that putting the blame on dutch completely is wrong!
The communication in the cryptocurrencytalk forums on this topic were a mess.
It was Peppernrino who posted the misleading link to the ODLK's testing branch website, not dutch.
This was cleared up a bit by ICE00 who hosts the testing branch website. But they also made the statement to add two entries to the whitelist if the vote turns out on a Yes. This put up an unnecessary discussion later and again put the wrong project website into focus.
You made it clear what was the reason for the two different websites but on January 16th Neuralminer stated that the vote was concerning the testing branch webstite ODLK1. ICE00 reacted to this without any opposing comment.
The perfect comment on the situation came from Nataly Makarova: "Now the initiators of the vote have problems."
When the vote got through someone made a whitelist entry with the name Odlk1 but the team stats url for ODLK.
Now, please enlighten me. In which parts of this huge mess of miscommunication do I need to add lines for dutch having something to do with it?