Looking at Ethereum's Governance Practice from the ProgPow Controversy
Editor's Note: This article comes fromBlue Fox Notes (ID: lanhubiji), reprinted by Odaily with authorization.
Editor's Note: This article comes from
Blue Fox Notes (ID: lanhubiji)
Blue Fox Notes (ID: lanhubiji)
, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.
Foreword: There has never been a lack of governance disputes in the history of the blockchain, and Bitcoin and Ethereum have had hard forks. The most controversial recently is ProgPoW of Ethereum, and the voting event of Steemit a few days ago. For the growth of any chain, governance disputes are almost inevitable. During the dispute process, the governance resilience of the different chains, as well as the resilience of the blockchain itself, can be demonstrated. And this is also the key to whether the blockchain can continue to grow, and it is also an important part of evaluating its value. The author of this article is Checkmate, translated by "SIEN" of "Blue Fox Notes".
The reading of this situation is that the ProgPoW controversy has largely focused on discussing Ethereum's power structure, rather than ProgPoW's technical merits. In many ways, this controversy is similar to the Bitcoin scaling/SegWit debate, which dragged on for years and eventually became a question of who actually controls Bitcoin. Is it users, miners or developers or economic nodes? Instead of focusing on the technical advantages of SegWit.
This is a good thing.
As Spencer Nunn pointed out, this is a sign of the maturity of Ethereum, which has reached the stage of a $30 billion network. (Blue Fox Note: Due to price fluctuations, it is currently around 25 billion US dollars) Of which more than 1 billion US dollars are locked in leveraged and price-sensitive DeFi applications, and there are important parallel values depending on its primitives, protocols, and people.
Scott Lewis pointed out that this will not be the last discussion that leads to contentious and dangerous forks. If all events go according to plan, then the next time there is perhaps a $300 billion network governance dispute, it will become even more important to reach a solid consensus before escalating into a potential chain split.
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Why write this article?
This article is from an outsider who considers himself relatively knowledgeable about blockchain mechanics and has experience with the Decred project. The purpose of comments is only to provide constructive comments based on the lessons learned by the author from actively participating in the Decred governance process.
Consensus views are not gameable
To make a meaningful statement, there must be a vital interest in it
The ability to achieve upgrades through consensus, due to the risk of destructive chain splits due to upgrades to the consensus of the Bitcoin model, is largely unacceptable in the case of DeFi.
In fact, the real inspiration for this article came from seeing the responses of Ameen and MolochDAO, which suggested the need for a coordinated system where there needs to be a stake in the stake behind every signal, which can be achieved through unforgeable on-chain voting ( It does not have to be at Layer 1). The author of this article believes that this is very powerful and fully agrees.
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purpose of this article
This article does not attempt to tell Ethereum how to govern, nor does it attempt to undermine the rough consensus model it has adopted. Instead, the purpose of this article is to highlight that the Ethereum community can benefit from the governance principles and tools pioneered by Decred.
According to Decred's constitution, the first three principles are directly relevant to the discussion.
Free and Open Source Software - All software developed as part of Decred should be free and open source
Free Speech and Deliberation - Everyone has the right to express their opinions and ideas. All constructive statements based on fact and reason should be considered.
These procedures underpin mechanisms for efficient and decisive social coordination. Together, they empower the wider community with a meaningful voice within the constraints of distributed ledger technology.
Ultimately, if Ethereum can implement a set of tools that facilitate better coordination of "controversial" fork proposals, then it can render useless the supposed "advantage" of its most likely competitor, Tezso.
The combination of on-chain and off-chain governance aligns with the Ethereum social contract and the path to innovation and DAOs. Ultimately, Decred DAO has had a lot of initial code written and tested in production implementations over the years, which hopefully reduces the risk of other people's efforts.
Ideally, this discussion provides a springboard for new ideas, coordination tools, and processes to safely manage future contentious forks. This solution promises to make James Hancock's job easier and less stressful (by automating much of it)
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governance observation
The following sections discuss tweets and ideas. It's about cases where Ethereum community members say "I want Ethereum to have x" in terms of social coordination. Overall, the community is gradually focusing on the key elements that make Decred's governance model strong.
It's important to remember that Decred's governance model involves both off-chain social contracts and on-chain technology and hard fork capabilities. Decred has chosen to provide transparent and common rules of engagement and build tools to facilitate discussions.
These principles apply to any blockchain governance model, with the possible exception of Bitcoin.
1. Measuring consensus
Twitter's poll is invalid, and neither is the closed conference call. The latter is actually destructive as it undermines the trust of the community to know the actual impact of its statements on the core developers, as ProgPoW is the latest example. People can answer polls on Twitter without owning any ETH. In fact, what would happen if you found out that most of the votes were from fans of EOS, Tezos or Bitcoin, which would just ruin your stats?
It's in their best interest for their fans to do so.
I'm sure the ethereum community is much more than 625 to 2070 people, and I'm sure there are even more people trying to disrupt it.
The most powerful approach to date is the release of EIP-2538, which equates to a petition signed by many leading product developers and community influencers. The opposition proposal to ProgPoW (EIP-1057) makes the opposition formal and certainly makes ProgPoW undeniably controversial.
If developers and miners collude and promote ProgPoW, it is likely to cause chain forks, damage to trust, and the reliability of the current governance model. This is clearly an undesired result.
Where the EIP process can be commended is the inclusion of unforgeable signatures, possibly with economic meaning behind them. MolochDAO signatures have a verifiable hash that contains a certain amount of ETH (the root of some hash state) for or against a change.
Anonymous signer lists are a positive step toward privacy protection, however, the system is easily gamed, which requires some cryptographic and behavioral proof of each entity's existence. Pseudonym accounts account for the majority of DecredDAO, and these people must gradually gain the trust of the community based on their good performance and delivery. Once trusted, they can communicate easily through their identity and cryptographic signatures.
2. Clarity of rules and education
A prominent feature of the ProgPoW controversy is that there is little discussion around whether the project actually needs it. Many seem to lack a proper understanding of technical or game theory issues, and few discuss the merits of both sides of this change. Some attempts have been made to aggregate support or opposition. However, the discussion on twitter tended more toward yelling and less understanding of what ProgPoW actually means for blockchains in the long run.
As an off-chain governance system, Politeia's main advantage is that it is a process and the rules of engagement are already clearly defined. People know how to be active. Decred’s governance rules are clear, which means that even if an issue is contentious, the path to a decision is clear.
This process is complemented by the monthly Decred Journal and the Decred In-Depth Podcast, which educates stakeholders. These two mediums provide a means for stakeholders to track progress and learn the distilled details of each change, long before the points of contention. (Blue Fox Note: That is to say, in governance, a very important part is to explain the changes of things clearly through ordinary explanations, so that everyone's cognition can reach a relatively equal level to facilitate communication. Propaganda is an important part of governance component)
In general, a subset of the Decred community are regular participants in governance, however, occasionally there will be a mix of old and new voices, especially on controversial issues. This shows that they remain attentive to the issue and jump out when others don't fully understand their point of view. You can see a lot of similarities with the EIP-2538 signer.
Keep people well-informed, motivate them, and give everyone the tools to actively participate. To be consistent with game theory, participation must require players to invest their savings (to achieve stakes) in order to achieve more correct and risk-minimizing decisions.
Decred is a relatively small network compared to Ethereum and faces challenges in scaling. Ultimately, what needs to scale is the social contract of the network, and this is true for all distributed ledgers.
Education, clear rules of engagement, and acting in one's own best interest scale well. In contrast, opaque governance and rough consensus, while characteristic in many ways, most undoubtedly lead to toxic, unproductive debates that ultimately distract from the substance of the issues at hand. Don't let toxicity be the governance mechanism of Ethereum.
3. Related to vital interests
A Bitcoin supporter with only ETHBTC shorts left in their portfolio should have close to zero say in Ethereum governance.
Temporary holders of ETH should have mechanisms for them to gain a voice, but as a collective, those with the greater number of signatures are the most powerful.
The staff of MolochDAO, Maker, and Compound are important. They are the cornerstone of DeFi, supporting large-scale investment and controlling a large number of user assets under management. Their voice should be appropriately expanded to provide guidance to the community.
Based on polls published on etherchain.org, miners have voted in favor of the ProgPoW migration with tools to demonstrate consensus.
This is where "at stake" becomes important. There are many models for this, each with its own tradeoffs:
One CPU one vote. This leads to miner centralization, especially when ASICs enter the fray (problem faced by ProgPoW). It would also bring a contentious hard fork vulnerability, as PoW is great at following the rules, but terrible at making new ones.
One token, one vote. Generally speaking, subject to the influence of noise, it is relatively easy to play games under the circumstances of borrowing and selling DAO at the same time. It also tends towards authoritarian or oligarchy governance with a lot of influence over the largest token holders while having few tools to mitigate their influence. (Blue Fox Note: It can be seen from the Steemit incident that token voting is easily controlled by super token holders)
Opt-in and show us your vital interests. Make an appropriately sized vote. This is Decred's model. Align incentives by tying voter storage/investment to chain success for an indeterminate amount of time. Voters must be made to feel the risks of their decisions so that, as a result, those with the greatest economic stake will make rational decisions. Like ASICs in PoW, and validators in PoS, voters are incentivized to protect their investment in their best interest.
Today, Ethereum already has more transfers than Decred and Bitcoin, but this article does not have a complete answer. However, it can be realized that Eric is asking the same question, and there is no doubt that there are enough smart people in Ethereum to solve these tradeoffs and realities.
The tricky problem for the Ethereum community is ensuring that the very large stakeholders (founders, developers, and ETs) play within a clear rulebook developed by the community. At the same time, the Ethereum community also faces the challenges of lending and money market rewards.
4. Become a DAO of DAOs
Ethereum has become a kind of DAO, it just lacks the key components of an effective mechanism that can coordinate contentious issues (external toxicity and chaos). The long-term result is rigidity, which at this stage of the game is not ideal given the innovations currently underway.
Bitcoin proponents are always critical of Ethereum (and Decred's) coordination mechanisms. Leave them alone. Let Bitcoin do its thing and become hard money.
Decred is the perfect counterattack answer to Bitcoin. It embraces human intellect and coordinates it with a formalized hive mind to make it decisive. It sees the world through the lens of what can be achieved as a team and what is lost in toxic and useless arguments. Instead, Decred chooses to educate, inform, spend money online, and conference calls.
As a DAO, Decred generally follows Scott's solution path, advocating conservative, informed, and incremental governance and evolution. If there is no consensus, it maintains the status quo.
Controversial or not, Decred makes a decision and delivers.
Ethereum already hosts many sub-DAOs, and each sub-DAO has its own responsibility and economic value. This sub-DAO can aggregate meaningful votes and count actual economic weights after its decisions. There's no reason why Ethereum couldn't create DAOs that could issue ad-hoc voting tokens (or equivalent) under the token standard purely to approve hard fork consensus changes.
These tokens are anchored into Politeia instances (similar to Decred's tickets), each representing the aggregated voice of like-minded people. Votes come from a large number of sub-DAOs, DeFi applications and businesses based on Ethereum. The system can most likely be integrated directly into your smart contract wallet interface.
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Lessons learned from Decred
Overall, the authors see some key lessons learned that are similar to the Decred model. Some may (or may not) apply to Ethereum:
Decred functions through a combination of off-chain and on-chain governance mechanisms. Ethereum can use eth native technology to build all on-chain parts (DAO, mortgage contracts, token standards, etc.). The challenge comes from shaping the social layer off-chain. Given that social tools other than Twitter polls and gameable petitions are heard, this will prove fruitful and spur further governance innovation.
Toxicity is a waste of time. The article linked above perfectly sums up the consensus Bitcoin model by toxicity, and Decred is the perfect reverse vote against it. Toxicity is a defense mechanism that, although taken to impose a stance, is usually ineffective. The clarity of the signal is more powerful, and we have the tools to provide ultimate transparency and reliability.
The EIP process can be intertwined with systems such as Politeia, where account identities require a small amount of upfront funding to generate (0.1DCR/0.01ETH), making spam expensive. Perhaps this scales in proportion to the economic vote/signaling weight the entity seeks.
Create a pool of known, trusted, pseudonymous cryptographic identities. Once MolochDAO, Ameen, Eric, or future heavy metal fan club MetallicaDAO has a verified Politeia identity, voting and reaching a legitimate and unforgeable consensus becomes less important. The community often follows these thought leaders (especially MetallicaDAO).
Politeia manages censorship by anchoring sessions into the Decred (or Ethereum) blockchain every hour. If someone's comment is censored, Politeia publishes the censorship hash along with the mandatory reason for the admin's censorship as proof that it happened.
in conclusion
Stakeholder participation is an important part of governance. People with more vital interests can feel the risk of consensus-level decision-making more. The trick is to make sure that any capital that has voting rights is tied to the outcome of the decision as judged by the market. How it works with Ethereum's unique token distribution, lending market, and various stakeholder groups remains a challenge.
The "contested fork process" is only triggered after a certain number of node upgrades and other signaling requirements have been met. For example, Decred requires 95% of miners and 75% of stakeholders to upgrade nodes with lazy code before any consensus voting begins. After enough identities prove that it is indeed disputed, perhaps the Ethereum EIP may trigger some events.
Before consensus voting begins, Decred requires 95% of miners and 75% of stakeholders to upgrade nodes.
in conclusion
At the end of the day, governance is a very hard problem, and fixing the system to the rearview mirror is even more difficult. Zcash, Bcash, and now Ethereum are high-profile projects whose governance is on the agenda. As Bitcoin proponents like to say, governance doesn't exist, but it certainly exists, and it makes or breaks the protocol.
As the Ethereum project moves to PoS, there is an opportunity to consider how this governance system can be built into the social and technical layers to improve the life cycle of innovation.
Ethereum embraces open innovation, why risk it with a Bitcoin model that relies on upgrading nodes to reach consensus? !
Any social consensus mechanism doesn't even need to be tied to the chain. Simply provide your community with a mechanism to provide unforgeable, verifiable proof of opinion to miners and developers.
