Quote from: CoinHoarder on January 03, 2016, 01:36:38 AM

Maybe you can explain the point...? The link talks about one vote per person being impossible to do on a decentralized cryptocurrency (which is true with today's technology). However, in Decred's design, voting will be weighted by the amount of stake owned (which certainly works...)

The link was to the summary of an extended and detailed discussion of the practicalities of actually trying to get an insight into the community's collective preferences.

The discussion starts back on the 24th Nov: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=623147.msg13056330#msg13056330 and continues off'n'on over the next three dozen pages. It delineates a particularly unsettling period for the community and is focused on assessing the desirability / acceptability of different potential changes to the coin as future defensive measures.

The kernel of the principle is pretty much nailed in dooglus' response to smooth's concerns about centralization:

Quote from: dooglus on November 25, 2015, 08:41:57 PM

Quote from: smooth on November 25, 2015, 08:21:29 PM

I also believe this can potentially be undermined by "voting" systems that are inherently centralizing (share of voting power is an increasing function of share of stake).

I was talking to Creative about this a couple of days ago. I was voicing my concerns that giving voting power proportional to stake means that the rich get to have their own way at the expense of the poor.

As Benjamin Franklin apparently never said:

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote."

I worry that the CLAM rich will vote to disenfranchise the CLAM poor - but Creative points out that the voting system is only a provably fair way of gathering information about consensus. Any change would still be subject to the usual soft-fork rules, requiring a super-majority to be in favour of the fork before it activated. And the "CLAM rich" would have to be pretty short sighted to vote in any change which would be seen as unfair - because that would damage the price of the coin, and so end up affecting them negatively. Adding the ability to express your opinion on-chain in a well-defined way doesn't cause any harm, and allows us to get a clearer view of what the community wants than the current best system we have - that of shouting at each other in forum posts.

This perspective was developed further during the discussion.

My perception is that setting voting power proportional to stake allows the interests of large stakeholders to dominate the community and overtly advertises that distortion which is an effective means of driving away the smaller, uninfluential stakeholders, leaving the coin moribund. Makes no odds how many coins you have, you can't compel the super-majority of the community to adopt a fork. Its hardly voting if an unpopular outcome can simply be rejected by a super-majority - which is why CLAMS refers to their particular approach to consultation as a petition.

I note the website asserts: Project bound by the Decred Constitution. No it isn't, it's an open source peer-to-peer networked cryptocurrency and people are free to behave as they see fit. The inherent egality of peers and the lack of identity defeat any attempts at coercion, no matter how well-intentioned or otherwise. It seems a bit of a profound misunderstanding to attempt to impose a centralised constitution on a user group that is constrained by the limitations of the cryptographic protocols to be an anarcho-collectivist system (one which envisions the means of production being owned collectively and controlled and managed by the producers themselves).

Cheers

Graham