- Disclosure I am on the developer board for ICDevs
I’ve been deeply pondering what has gone on here, and I believe this situation highlights a concern for all IC participants who seek the success of the IC (and thus possibly the value of their ICP).
I’m not that concerned with this specific proposal that hasn’t passed. But I am concerned that a few whales are able to sway the vote away from the will of many other participants with less voting power. This is an assumption of course, I do not know the actual numbers of humans involved in the votes.
Let me try to lay out some fundamental reasoning for why we do not want the amount of ICP staked to be the only determinant of voting power:
We’re trying to create a system of government that leads to true or correct outcomes. We all seem to agree that very centralized decision making will not always lead to the best outcomes, and thus we’re against that form of government.
We also all seem to agree that a decentralized form of government in the form of a democracy will lead to better outcomes than a centralized form of government. But our democracy is far different than the traditional/modern democracies implemented by nations around the world. Our democracy only cares about how much ICP is owned by a voting agent.
Why is that? The fundamental reasoning seems to be that because the value/price of ICP is inextricably linked to the success of the system that is being governed (the Internet Computer), then the more ICP that a voting agent owns, the more motivation they will have to make true or correct votes.
Democracy is a decentralized truth-seeking process, and we’ve quantified each agent’s truth-seeking capabilities into one metric: ICP staked.
I think this is fundamentally flawed. I do believe that each person who owns and stakes ICP is generally motivated to make correct decisions regarding the IC so as to maximize the future value of their ICP. But I also believe there is a limit to the effect that a person’s ICP balance has on their ability to benefit the network through correct decision-making.
What is the difference in decision-making motivation between someone who owns 100 ICP vs 1000 ICP? 1000 ICP vs 10,000 ICP? 10,000 ICP vs 100,000 ICP?
I don’t know the answers, but I think we can agree that at some point there is a diminishing return on decision-making motivation/capability and ICP owned.
I think we should attempt to approximate this extra decision-making capability based on ICP owned. Here’s my suggestion: let’s explore some combination of 1-person-1-vote (because each human being inherently has some ability to make correct decisions, and the combination of many varied opinions is very valuable) and a voting power cap, possibly logarithmic (similar to quadratic voting).
1-person-1-vote with some form of voting power cap may maximize the correct decision-making power of the entire network. And that’s really what all rational ICP holders should want, a network that is maximized for making correct decisions regarding the Internet Computer and its native asset ICP.