This sounds interesting, a method to vote by account, but removes the incentive to make a ton of new accounts? I'm not sure if I grasp the bottomline of this implementation, can you state in words how this will prevent someone from making a ton of accounts? Lastly, how can you calculate similarity? Can't someone can just put their coins through a mixer/exchange?
It won't prevent anyone from making a ton of new accounts, however when they use those accounts to vote for one option the accounts that appear to be participating in a organized manner will have their similarity increased,decreasing voting weight.
similarity starts as one for all accounts
Vote issue 1 is split by a 60% 40% vote
statistically a voter chosen at random will have a 60% chance of choosing the winning outcome, a person with multiple accounts has a higher probability initially.
Vote issue 2 is split by a 60% 40% vote
Vote issue 3 is split by a 60% 40% vote
BankA
x represents accounts that voted and won.
If BankA
1 contains [accounts a, b, c, d, x, y and z]
and BankA
2 contains [accounts b, c, y and z]
and BankA
3 contains [accounts a, b, y and z] and
b, y and z's similarity will be increased by .1/ (.216), .216 being the probability of that occurring naturally (.6^3). As the probability goes to zero the similarity is increased exponentially.
The mixer/exchange problem is circumvented by adding the timesVoted variable, the more times an account has cast a vote for an issue the more weight his vote will have exponentially.
So if you don't vote and try to game the system by varying votes between accounts you will be left in the dust by people consistently voting.
An account recently made will have 25% the voting power of a account that has voted once already.
I like it. It removes the incentive to make multiple accounts to vote almost completely. Although, I assume that most people here vote in the best interest of NXT, so wouldn't a lot of people get their voting power reduced just because they always vote in the best interest of NXT (and thus are very likely to chose the same option)? Maybe this is a fringe case and not common at all? This seems to work better in multi-option polls, where it is much less likely for two individuals to coincide often. Also, this scenario just came to mind: Suppose someone creates 1000 accounts for the purpose of voting. Can't he game this system by randomly voting on issues he doesn't care about (reducing similarity greatly and not really influencing the vote in anyway) and when one he cares about does come up, he points all 1000 accounts at the option he wants? Because of his previous random voting pattern, the system will not be able to detect that he is gaming this particular vote.
We would also have to maintain a separate ledger to hold the records of all the accounts that voted, correct? (Or use AM, but at 1000 bytes per message, the number of messages required would increase over time as more and more accounts vote) We could run a parallel blockchain (secured by the NXT network) that only records matters dealing with the voting system. Voting would cost min fee (1 NXT), and these payments will be paid out to forgers, encouraging them to take on the second blockchain.