[Phase 1] HIP-67: Legitimize and Lock Delegations

DAO
1 
HIP: 67
title: Legitimize and Lock Delegations
author: @greenlucid
status: Phase 1
created: 2022-09-19
conflicts with: None
languages: EN

Simple Summary

Assert that proposals votes are counted with a 1p1v delegation strategy, and Lock it so that it’s politically expensive to modify.

Abstract

Assert and lock that delegated votes are equal to active votes. After this is accepted, any proposal willing to modify this behavior will need, at the very least, to win the “Accept changes” option with 75% of the vote.

Motivation

A proposal is currently ongoing to stop delegations from being equal in value to active vote signatures. This automatically removes the “1p1v” signature statement about PoH governance from being true, as some humans will have a more valuable vote than others.

That proposal doesn’t solve any of its intended features:

  • Gerrymandering is not stopped, given that the proposal itself is an instance of gerrymandering, changing how votes are counted to obtain an immediate political advantage. This is equivalent to arbitrarily changing voter “regions” to increase power to one of the sides. Every invocation of the word gerrymandering in this proposal fail to acknowledge this, without even explaining what does this even have to do with gerrymandering. The mention of this word is cynical at best and an attempt to through political lingo to obfuscate what is going on.
  • Actual sybil farmers come to obtain more power, since they have control of the accounts, and can vote actively without resistance.
  • Signing a vote is not equivalent at all to being active in the proposals, or even ponder about it. Onboarders looking to increase their political power can simply create engagement groups, and ping delegators to actively sign the vote, without the signer even knowing what they are signing for.

Implementation

Set Snapshot strategies as:

ERC20 Vote

Strategy: erc20-balance-of
Network: Ethereum Mainnet
Symbol: VOTE
Contract address: 0x1dAD862095d40d43c2109370121cf087632874dB
Decimals: 0

ERC20 Delegation

Strategy: erc20-balance-of-delegation
Network: Ethereum Mainnet
Symbol: VOTE
Contract address: 0x1dAD862095d40d43c2109370121cf087632874dB
Decimals: 0

Rationale

Delegations are an UX feature provided by Snapshot. They work, in practice, in the following way:

  • Target an address
  • Whatever this address votes, copy it by default.
  • If you’re not content with this vote, you can override at any time.

Removing 1 delegation 1 vote is effectively nerfing this UX feature, that prevents proposals from slipping through without users making their vote count.

Removing delegations is also antithetical to democracy. If this nerfed delegation system were to become a staple, no longer will each human have a vote. Some humans are not able to be in control of their keys at all times (think, an user having a trip to another country without bringing in their hardware wallet). These users will stop having a fair representation. If delegations are nerfed, it is fair to claim PoH is no longer a democracy. It could be, instead, labelled as a signocracy, activecracy, or meritocracy.

2

Taking into consideration we have an ongoing vote about this subject right now, I would encourage you to campaign your position about it rather than consistently having this topic being voted. This proposal seems spammy, redundant and pointless with an active debate and vote around HIP 63.

Assuming people are mindless idiots that would blindly sign anything pretty much shows your lame understanding about people as simple tools.

“Creating engaging groups and having people vote directly” portrayed as a negative thing rather than a positive thing is beyond bizarre. That’s precisely the point in favour of how Quadratic Delegations incentivize more engagement, not less. :man_facepalming:

This belongs to the improvement of PoH itself and “explicit sybil resistant” measures. Not governance.

Worth noticing the use of the word “gerrymandering” was used to attack my position, not your side of the table. Also worth noticing the lack of mention of clientelist attacks like the one we have seen the past few weeks.

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