Periodic confirmation of following is released!

[Accumulating.icp]

@lara

How much voting power do neurons have (did the change decrease or increase this)?

Neurons now execute 13% more of the vote than they did previously, so while the voting power did not directly increase, it does increase the proportional vote of each active neuron.

@lara

What would it take to “buy up” 51% of the voting power?

I have done research on this in the past (at different prices & staked quantities), as this is a concern that has been pushed by the foundation in relation to canister controlled neurons <> neuron markets, however, I’m curious why this is worth implementing “barriers” in one instance, and a non-issue in another?

@lara

it might be useful to distinguish the voting power one neuron has and the voting power induced by one neuron (including its followers). A neuron can have more deciding voting power by itself, but have less weight in the overall voting because its followers’ voting power falls away. In this case one can still argue that this is a gain for security.

Using DFINITY as an example;

@Accumulating.icp

The dashboard itself shows that DFINITYs vote power increased from 19.99% to 23.03%, by 15% , under this model.

Prior to this model being implemented, DFINITY cast 34.1% of the vote on motion proposals.

At present day, DFINITY casts 38.7% of the votes on motion proposals.

@lara

it might also be useful to look at different proposal topics. For example, since following has already been reset for the governance topic, the “sleeper neurons” already fell away for this proposal and following was already more diverse for this topic. Therefore, I expect that the numbers look slightly different here compared to other topics, like protocol and canister upgrades. But of course we’d have to confirm.

I agree, randomly selecting the topics “Application Canister Management”, “IC OS Version Deployment” & “Node Admin”, we find;

Application Canister Management:
Past Vote Power: 94.8%
Present Vote Power: 87.8%
(This difference is due to the 30M Voting Power that unfollowed the DFINITY foundation & votes individually, had this 6.8% continued to follow DFINITY, they would execute 94.6% of the vote)

IC OS Version Deployment:
Past Vote Power: 94.5%
Present Vote Power: 97.1%

Node Admin:
Past Vote Power: 86%
Present Vote Power: 81.7%

@lara

Indeed, if the overall voting power considered for proposals is smaller, then a smaller number of ICP is needed to get 51%. In analysis before the feature it was suggested that this number was still large enough to make such an attack unrealistic.

Yet not unrealistic for those who already have voting power - this reinforces the proportional voting power of ‘active’ neurons and reduces the quantity of ICP required to pass a proposal.

If you expect voting power to continue to decline for another 2 weeks, that means we’re half way at 66M - we can extrapolate this to ~132M Voting power being removed from quorum, resulting in a total voting power of 362M.

DFINITYs 99.3M Voting power will then execute 27.4% of the vote, but I could have sworn the foundation sold on us for years to achieve “greater decentralization”.