Quote from: spatula on February 22, 2017, 03:29:27 PM

YYou can't punish people for not voting, that's undemocratic. The addition of the abstain option in 12.1 helps some with this, but really, if I don't care one way or another about a proposal I am not gonna open my wallet to vote abstain, when I could just not vote. Even if I think a proposal is the greatest thing ever, if it's obviously going to pass with an overwhelming YES - No ratio, why would I vote? If you are holding on to $20k USD worth of an asset, you better damn well get to decide if you want to vote or not along with how you vote.

LOL "undemocratic" when voting is limited to a special elite few rich people who already earn interest on their holdings? I mean really, listen to yourself. Are you trying to promote Dash, or turn people away? Please, my lord, allow this humble servant into your estate!

Personally I think that a MN that doesn't vote in a timely manner should be put to the back of the line of MN earnings. That being said, if the voting system as described truly only gives 2 or 3 days to vote, I think that needs to be changed, and that proposals should be able to carry on through to the next month (or perhaps the system revamped, so that a proposal always has 1 full month to be voted on, on a rolling basis instead of having voting end on a calendar month). Giving people a 2-3 day window to evaluate a proposal and vote on it is clearly a bit burdensome, and I wouldn't support a punishment for not voting if the short window persists.

On the larger problem, I'm not really talking about an "attacker" taking over the system but more like the kind of cronyism that is easily pervasive and hard to detect. Let's retain a law firm... the attorney just happens to be my cousin. Let's get some marketing material.... the artist just happens to be my college roommate's wife. I'm not saying that it's vulnerable to attacks by bad actors; I'm saying that there is a pretty obvious way that this power could be abused in a banal manner by the inner circle of MN owners, not in a way that would destroy the system, but in a way that could over time destroy faith in the system. And the inner circle needs to do everything possible to make clear any possible conflict of interests and abstain from any vote, or from proposing anything, that could possibly taint things in the eyes of the public. The "Instamine" meme has lasted long enough, and the creation of MNs and diversion of half of the mining proceeds to MN owners only cements the perception of Darkcoin/Dash as a simple Creator-Enrichment-Machine.

Taking salaries and such, well, how far do you guys really want to carry this? Again, I believe that Evan is talanted, and that the development of Dash shows promise. I like the ideas there. But if you really want to break that negative perception, the major owners and development team need to go above and beyond in terms of disclosing things. I would even go so far as disclosing all of Evan's (and the other core developers / anybody on salary) MNs, with some kind of a promise of locking up a certain percentage of funds long-term a la Satoshi Nakamoto. If Satoshi ever moved his coins, it would have a seismic effect on the price of Bitcoin. If Evan / Devs moved their large Dash holdings, it would have a similar effect. They have to realize this. Some kind of publication and commitment to lock up their coins for a long period (5 years? 10 years?) could only have a positive effect.