I do think committee neurons is worth exploring, but perhaps the complexity could be too much too soon for the NNS.
There are other options though, I’m going to copy below a comment I recently posted on the Daowabunga channel of the Psychedelic Discord server (this is another proposal I need to write up soon):
Nima & I chatted about this on the live DSCR thread , but I just wanted to bring it up again. I think Quadratic Voting would be a great proposal for the NNS, and I would love to see this come from the Psychedelic Neuron.
Nima said Daowabunga’s v2 governance canister’s will likely support Quadratic Voting, which is awesome!
Even if the NNS was much more decentralized, there will always be a threat of very rich and powerful entities (think BlackRock) buying influence as long as 1-on-1 voting is in place.
It’s tricky, but governance power should be liquid yet not so liquid such that the outcome of decisions can be outright purchased (sadly in the USA it’s both illiquid and up for sale). Sure, the ICP supply can be mostly locked into Neurons, but ultimately this would only slow down the quiet and subtle accumulation of a large bad actor.
Quadratic Voting would reduce DFINITY’s influence without destroying their revenue stream. I assume they ultimately plan to cover the cost of operations using the maturity of their neurons. Having them airdrop their ICP and/or neurons would introduce a wide range of issues, and I see no problem with the inventors of the protocol having a good long term strategy for funding R&D operations. If we can find a way for them to keep their maturity without being too powerful or hurting the ecosystem, then that would be ideal.
In fact, I actually think it may be smart to have the neuron maturity rewards slightly decrease to perhaps 10%-25% of the current rate for small neurons if we enable Quadratic Voting. This means that as your neuron stake increases, your additional voting power decreases exponentially while your maturity reward rate slightly improves.
This would have a few positive implications:
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If you vote manually, you’ll earn a slightly smaller amount of maturity for that particular vote, but your vote will be given significantly more influence in determining the outcome. This means you must choose between a small loss of profit vs a principle which may matter a great deal to you, and a wave of passionate manual votes by small neurons could have a chance against of handful of large neurons followed by all the passive voters.
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The power of Quadratic Voting could easily be circumvented by a large and powerful bad actor if they simply created thousands of small neurons which followed the votes of their primary neuron. By forcing them to choose between maximizing profit vs maximizing influence, we should gain a bit more resilience for the protocol. While nothing can be made impossible, we should make purchasing significant control of the NNS as infeasible as possible (ideally, exponentially less feasible the harder you try).
I’d be happy to publish a more detailed write-up of this concept if you think it’s something Psychedelic might want to support. Just let me know!
A few other thoughts:
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It could be smart to also introduce a small fee for creating new neurons (or splitting one). This would also hurt bad actor efforts to get around quadratic voting by creating lots of small neurons rather than a single large one.
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There should be a “Defer” or “More Info Needed” voting option on the NNS. It wouldn’t immediately kill the proposal like a “No” vote, but instead holds it open longer and allows edits until the “Defer” voters can feel good picking either “Yes” or “No”. Incentivizing voting activity is a good idea, but on it’s own it introduces a risk of careless voting just to harvest rewards. There should be something to help prevent this, since default “No” or “Yes” from the bulk of careless voters would both lead to bad outcomes. In other words, people shouldn’t be penalized for not understanding a poorly written proposal, or forced into voting out of ignorance.