Voting Mechanism Improvement Proposal for xGov Fund Distribution

@trekianov Thank you for addressing the points more directly.
However, I think there were clearly quite a few misunderstandings of my previous comment.

Regarding the Global Quorum

The common point of the suggested Global Quorum and the suggested Alternative is that measures should be put in place to prevent a small fraction of ALGO (holders) distribute large amount of common funds.
The difference is on where the limits should be placed.

With the Global Quorum, the (minimum) limits are to be placed on the relative amount (i.e. ratio) of ALGO that volunteered to participate in the process of fund distribution and the ones that actually participated in the process (i.e. voted), as explained:

With the outcome of not meeting the set limit be to not distribute any funds, as explained:

The main issue with this is the possibility of not distributing any funds which would be frustrating for the volunteers that actually participated in the process, as already stated:

One additional aspect the Global Quorum does not solve is the case when there are few ALGO volunteering to even participate in the voluntary fund distribution process of xGov. As an example of an extreme case, if there are only 3 users each with 1 ALGO participating in the xGov process, and two do vote while one does not, the whole 2M funds would be available for distribution.
Although it is to be noted the registration process is simpler compared to the voting, and thus less likely to experience technical issues that could lead to a low participation among the whole ALGO. But there are other reasons besides technical issues that could lead to a low participation in the voluntary process of xGov, e.g. the frustration with ones effort being completely wasted just because others did not vote.

Therefore, the suggested Alternative, where the (minimum) limits are placed on the amount of ALGO that volunteered and participated in the process relative to the funds to be distributed. The reasoning being, the larger the absolute amount of ALGO that actually participated in the voluntary process of funds distribution, the more representative are their decisions of the views of the actual fund owners (i.e. the whole ALGO community), and thus the larger amount of funds can be distributed with a high confidence.

In this case, the actual limits would be set by the whole ALGO community (i.e. fund owners) during the regular Governance vote, as already suggested. (In the example from the previous comment, the limits were arbitrary, but meant to reflect that much more than 1 ALGO should be required to vote to allow distribution of 1 ALGO).

Indeed, this Alternative is resembling the old approach. The difference is that in the old approach, even if 1B ALGO participated in xGov and only 30% voted (i.e. 300M), the maximum number of funds distributed would still only be 30% of the available funds (e.g. 0.6M out of 2M). With the Alternative, the full amount of funds would be available for the distribution (assuming e.g. the limit of 1 ALGO distributed per 10 ALGO voted). Regarding the terminology, this could technically be referred to as a quorum on each ALGO to be distributed.

Regarding the probability of participation

I think I misunderstood you. Please correct me if I am wrong, but you are referring to the conditional probability that the Global Quorum would not be met in two sequential sessions, while I understood it as the probability that a certain participation level is reached (or exceeded) in a voting session (and how that is changing between sessions).

Regarding the process of changes to the voting mechanism

I agree completely with the points raised. This is exactly why we need to have rules on how changes to the process can be made to be legitimately considered “made together with the community”, i.e. as suggested with the “xGov constitution” in the previous comment.
There would be no objections if there were rules stating that Algorand Foundation reserves the right to call up a vote 24h in advance for changing the mechanism, where the vote is conducted on Twitter with unrecorded emojis, and is considered valid if at least 100 users participate. Or something more realistic, e.g. that between the end of the last xGov voting period and the start of the proposal submission window for the next session, each Friday by 00:00 UTC+0 the Algorand Foundation can announce suggested changes to the xGov mechanism, and the xGovs that are currently eligible have 24h to vote by issuing a transaction to an address (similarly as with regular Governance). The results are confirmed if at least 10k ALGO vote and the majority of the vote approves the changes.
These rules can be introduced by the Algorand Foundation as part of T&C to participate in xGov, or preferably put to the general Governance vote for approval.

P.S. On the manner of the discussion

All the comments are/were made with the intent to provide constructive and respective feedback. If the latter did not come across and/or was interpreted to be aggressive, I do apologize. To note, the critique was never directed at any individual or at their assumed understanding. The last postscript was made as a mere suggestion on how to improve the quality of this discussion. The previous comment also made concrete proposals, which have been elaborated in this comment.

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