Governance Improvements

[Ticojohnny]

Let's have conversation on what kind of improvements could be implemented in the new governance system to better ensure that governance is not used for "griefing" and so that it represents the will of the common Atom One delegator and not that of validator politicians, Youtube personalities and Twitter influencers.

This is a great opportunity to discuss the flaws of Cosmos Hub governance and to think up some fixes, so I'm opening up this issue to highlight some governance topics that i've always thought could be improved on Cosmos Hub with the hopes to co-brainstorm or hear other ideas.

1. Don't let newly bought / transferred tokens vote - lock voting for each proposal to only the addresses staked at the beginning of that proposal

2. Restrict changing votes last minute - lock voting for proposal in the last day with the exception of NWV

3. Mandate atleast one public community hearing per new governance proposal that is professionally moderated (instead of scheduled 1:1 private meetings) so that discussions can be more open, transparent and recorded

4. Mandate atleast one week of discussion on a public forum before proposal goes on-chain to allow time for reiteration.

5. Figure out how to better use the Atom One delegator/voters to negotiate terms / reiterate on proposals without having it be shameful and defeating or a drawn-out process. Perhaps a new option to extend a proposal for a week?

6. Figure out how to minimize spam proposals, perhaps only counting a proposal as a proposal once the deposit has been met.

7. Push forward conversations on concepts and ideal scenarios for DAO / smart contract tooling to further standardize community pool-funded operations.

8. Enable people asking for community pool funding the ability to receive it but with proper transparency on how funds are being used and ideally the smart contract capabilities to prove/ensure that happens the way it was proposed.

9. Brainstorm alternative validator power structures - An idea would be to have validators forced to vote the same as the majority of their delegator's votes, so that each validator works as a representative of their delegators instead of just having the power of their delegations. Another alternative is this "hyperdelegation" concept from @clockworkgr and Decentralists https://github.com/atomone-hub/genesis/issues/40

10. Brainstorm alternative voting limitations - should dust accounts even be allowed to vote? A minimum of 1-5 tokens per vote could fix voting optics created by bots.

11. Brainstorm quorum re-calibrations - what kind of proposals should require supermajority besides inflation parameter changes as stated in the current CONSTITUTION.MD draft? Should NWV + NO be weighed together against a Yes vote? Should Abstain votes count? Should we have Abstain votes at all?

[giunatale]

I invite you to read also https://github.com/decentralists/DAO/tree/main/governance because we'll probably incorporate these too and I see some overlap with a few other points except 9.

[giunatale]

wrt to spam, what we have found is that actually current mitigations are already mostly effective. You don't see a lot of spam submissions and the very few that get the full deposit and enter the voting period are filtered out almost immediately at the front-end level by looking at the % of NWV received (you can toggle this on mintscan e.g.)

From the decentralists governance roadmap we might probably just want to implement active proposal throttling so we don't overwhelm voters. But in terms of spam that seems mostly addressed looking at the hub as of today.

[giunatale]

Also a bit of discussion around these aspects can also be found here https://github.com/atomone-hub/genesis/issues/7#issuecomment-1834364715 (including Jae's reply above)

[boliwar]

I am adamantly opposed to the validator's voice overshadowing my voice. My vote may be small < 0.0001%, but it's my decision. I have caught myself not wanting to vote because the validator would block it. Or let only those who reached a certain value vote.

[floridamanfintech]

@Ticojohnny

1. Very good idea imo

2. I do think people can organically change their mind when presented with a new perspective. I like the idea of private voting. While it's nice to be able to see who is voting for what, with a strong enough constitution it may not be as necessary. In the case of Redacted Finance on Luna, vals only changed their vote last minute because they were going to be "blacklisted" by the founding org for voting a certain way. With private voting, this wouldn't of been an issue. Participants can vote based on principles with private voting.

7 & 8. When cosmos hub prop 95 was up (AADAO), I was against it because imo there wasn't sufficient tooling to hold AADAO accountable for their spends. While I agree that not every tiny spend needs its own proposal, it shouldn't mean we give any funding organization free reign for a whole year. Would rather see mission-specific funding organizations that are focused on one big goal. Upon completion of that goal that funding org/dao should be disbanded. The goal shouldn't be something arbitrary like "bring value to the ATOM token". The problem with general funding DAOs like AADAO, is they are incentivized to convince the community that their work is never complete, because they want to continue getting funded to receive a nice comfy paycheck. And they will probably try to solve "problems" that aren't really problems. For instance, the ATOM inflation change. AADAO and its beneficiaries were one of the first ones pushing this change. This is the same reason why government programs never solve any issue. Because if they fixed the issue, then those "fixing" the issues would be out of a job.

9. I like the idea of validator votes to be only worth 50% (or other agreed upon percentage) of what their delegations are, whereas an individual delegator voting is worth 100% of their tokens. This could make it a bit harder for validator cartels to form. For instance, Exodus wallet delegates ATOMs to Everstake when you stake your ATOMs in Exodus. So Everstake is voting with the voting power of all Exodus users who decide to stake and hold ATOM in their exodus wallet . These are not folks who typically are engaged in governance processes. If Everstake is voting with this weight 1 to 1, is that really reflective of what the "community" wants?

[0xFDg]

I know this is not a technical suggestion, but I would like to share with you an opinion I have on a possible future systemic problem. States don't want us to have cryptocurrencies, and we can see that they are disincentivizing holding cryptocurrencies in all kinds of ways, such as taxing the stakes.

Into the future the major part of the people will have a derivatives, Fungible token or holdings in large funds as ETF, and less people will have real token directly in stake, this also for reason like personal safety, tax and for practical reasons.

True crypto asset will be hold in large percentage by big holdings and the major percentage of crypto in stake will be theirs, manipulating the governance, taxing the new protocols and grabbing most of the airdrops’s tokens into a toxic cycle. In substance nothing different form what the Major banks do now, only in a different form.

With PHOTON, but also with ATOM1, we are trying to overcome modern limits, trying to monetize trust and security, but I would like to focus on limits beyond limits and take two steps forward and not just one. We have to design governance to give the possibility in the future to readjust it dynamically so that it is always in the hands of everyone and not instead in the hands of the minorities, the strong powers.