From reactive politics to proactive politics (in blockchain governance)
One thing that I like in Bitshares governance model is the committee. It's elected set of users who have power to change blockchain parameters. Although I have to admit it's working very poorly in practice currently because nobody seems to get how important it is.
In theory, a governmental body like the committee should be a group that focuses on the business side of blockchain governance. They need to have business skills, with a little bit understanding of economics and psychology. Blockproducers are the tech guys, they should focus on technical side of the blockchain. In Steem these roles are combined.
We are now seeing a good example why it's not a good idea to combine the roles of tech workers and business decision making. Steem price has been going up so much that new accounts don't have enough Steem Power to have great user experience. The Steem blockchain limits how many transactions users can make based on how much SP they have, and currently new users aren't given enough when the account is created.
@timcliff has taken the initiative and brought up the issue. That's of course great, but it also shows how the system isn't perfect. This is a reaction to a problem instead of proactive problem solving to prevent this kind of situation.
Ideally a blockchain should have a role for somebody to think things like this in advance. It could be just a one person or a group. They should be aware of the current state of blockchain, have good understanding how things are evolving, and clear vision what the ecosystem will be in the future. Then they can either change the parameters themselves (if it's a feature built-in to the blockchain) or give recommendations (if it's the blockproducers who have the final say).
This might become a problem in EOS. It will have Steem-like system where blockproducers have the power to make changes. The role of a blockproducer will be demanding: not only they need to be highly skilled in running a complicated server reliably 24/7, but also have a good understanding of economics and some business skills. And not forgetting the constitution, which basically requires blockproducers to understand law, too. They will have huge responsibility. That's why my recommendation is to separate the roles of blockproducers and the rest of the governance. Let tech guys take care of running servers and free them from politics.
For Steem my short-term recommendation is to unofficially elect somebody or a group of people who will focus on blockchain economics, including things like blocksize, rate-limits, etc. They should give recommendations to witnesses in advance to prevent problems like new users not having enough SP to use their accounts properly.
I love the Steemit community model too but as you note some of the economics especially when it comes to scaling still need to be ironed out but we're moving in the right direction in my opinion.
Its complicated when someone has the power, he might get greedy
Yeah, it really is complicated. That's why these things need to be thought thoroughly.
Please upvote me @samupaha
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Upvote-begging doesn't work here. If you do it too much, you might get downvotes instead.
As long as the folks you unofficially elect are trustworthy. Thanks for sharing a great post.
They won't have any real power, they can only suggest what should be done. Basically they would be just hired to regularly write reports how Steem is functioning at the moment and warn if there are potential problems in the near future that need to be taken care of.
Thanks. Obviously you know much more than I do as I am a minnow. I will follow you and learn from you. Thanks for your post and reply. I will share a post of mine. Feel free to like or critique it as I am open to learning. Again thanks . - Troy
https://steemit.com/life/@enjoywithtroy/thanks-steemit-followers-for-the-100-plus-milestone-new-followers-always-welcome
I like your thoughts about Bitshares
I'm not entirely clear about the recommendation on block producers in EOS - is it possible to separate business from tech cleanly?
The block producers will be subject to community oversight in that they might get voted out. They will also be required to respond to upgrade requests, and potentially unwinds of problem transactions.
All of these already exist in Steem & Bitshares, and speak to some knowledge of the business and the law in general. What changes with EOS is that we are formalising (in the sense of writing down) the spirit and custom of the community in a constitution, and we are adding an arbitration arm.
That latter is a big change to the community but when it comes to the block producers it just again speaks to general business knowledge, in that they need to be able to read a ruling, extract their instructions and implement. Again, this speaks to business skills and responsibility.
But without this business acumen and responsibility what have we got? Are we back to Bitcoin's "maths is the law" concept? IMHO, that leaves the governance model emerging over the top, so we're back to the adhocracy.
Yes, of course. Just think about normal firms. In small firms it's possible to have workers who do everything possible. But when the business grows, one person can't know everything what is required to run the business. That's why there needs to be separate roles, for which different individuals are hired based on their skillset. Division of labor, like Adam Smith explained a few years ago.
Just running a block producing node will be a task which needs highly skilled labor. As Dan has told, when the amount of transactions starts to rise, nodes won't be running on just one computer, they will be implemented as clusters.
I don't think it will be easy to find individuals who can reliably run cluster nodes and be also knowledgeable with economics, game theory, business, psychology, law, etc.
Instead of seeking superhumans, it's better to divide different tasks for different roles so the required skillset won't be so extensive.
From decentralization perspective it's also better to have more people involved. It's especially important to decentralize the blockproducer group because they are those who keep the blockchain running. Political decision making can be more centralized, it's probably more efficient way to get real results.
We can also look this from the perspective of traditional state. Usually there is some kind of separation of powers, typically three branches: legislature, executive, and judiciary. In EOS this could map as legislature being those who make decisions over blockchain parameters (like Bitshares committee), executive being blockproducers, and judiciary being those who make decisions over interpretation of smartcontracts in problematic cases.
But there is huge problem with voter apathy. Most stakeholders check very rarely how blockproducers are doing. That's why most blockproducers don't bother to publish their reports very often. Proactive analyses are almost unheard of.
How much work you have done regarding this? Writing down all things that require decision making in EOS might surprise you if you haven't done that yet. I suspect it's not a short list.
What I'm advocating is just more roles to the governance system. I'm afraid that if we have only one role, those who will be in that will end up doing something they are not familiar with. When people are in a situation where they don't have any existing skills to deal with it, then they usually just make something up that sounds nice. And that's pretty much like adhocracy.
What you seem to be missing is that a 'witness' slot does not have to be a person. We have witness slots on steem getting votes that represent open source projects, community initiatives, and businesses. The people who contribute to running those witnesses are often doing the job as a team, and/or getting assistance from advisors, etc.
It is a reasonable question whether witnesses should be individuals and if so then yes I would agree with you the role should probably be more narrow and friendly to specialization. But you somewhat neglect a third option which is to vote in teams or leaders who will build teams of specialized individuals (I've hired people to help with some of my witness efforts, though I do much of it myself for now).
I've always expected that should this system scale up, the witness role will require more than one person. For example, just being on call 24/7 with high expectations of response time, availability, and reliability is not always something that one person can do (e.g. illness, being occasionally unavoidably inaccessible, etc.). Indeed I would suggest that ability to lead and make use of specialization is something that voters should evaluate (though you make good points about voter apathy as well, and in that regard we are somewhat doomed with a voting-based governance system).
I think it's very probable that the system will evolve in this direction over time (if there are no other big changes to the governance).
But there is still the problem of reactivity instead of proactivity.
When witnesses are required to do everything, it becomes much more difficult for voters to see how they are doing their job. One witness may be great at one thing, but neglect something else. When things go wrong, it's hard to see whose fault that has been.
For example, just look at the current situation of SP for new accounts. Whose fault is that it's not taken care of proactively? It's too hard to say, so voters are not going to change their votes (this is one big reason for voter apathy).
If there was a separate role for somebody to take care of blockchain parameters, problems like this would make clear for everybody that the person/organization in that role isn't doing the job. It would be easy to demand stakeholders to vote for somebody else who is more capable of doing it.
Good point, but then there is a risk of apathy from another angle. With too many different things to vote on, voters can easily find that they don't have the time or interest to understand them and get involved with voting.
I'm not sure exactly what SP situation you are talking about but there are several different considerations related to the SP of new accounts and it isn't a simple problem. That's actually a good example of something where many users would not want to get into the weeds and really understand it.
None of these questions have simple answers though, everything is a tradeoff.
Bit of a monster reply! Have you thought about turning it into a post so you can make some steem?
On the first point - tech v. biz - we may be looking at opposite ends of the telescope - I'm wondering whether it can be separated entirely - from 90% -> 100%. you might be thinking more of 0% -> 50%. And once we get beyond one person, we've possibly formalised a relationship between a business person and a tech person. That is, more people doesn't make it disconnected, it just means that the techie thinks more about tech. We hope.
LOL, I'm just blurting out stuff what happens to come into my mind, hoping to get some responses to tell whether or not I'm on the right track.
I'll write longer posts when I have time and inspiration.
Voter Apathy - ok. I buy that. I wondered. So how do we fix that? (I've been involved in a few communities, and I've seen varying results on this point of independent monitoring.)
At least three ways come to my mind right now:
Work - some. If by, have we done it yet, no, but we're half way there. Bear in mind we aren't anywhere until it is accepted by community ... but we have an example constitution, an example rules of dispute resolution and there is someone working on case management.
Or maybe i've misunderstood what you mean - all the things?
Anything that might require a decision that applies to the blockchain. For example, the blocksize that was mentioned in the OP. In Steem it's the responsibility of the witnesses. But it's not formalized in any way so they tend to not care about it until it becomes a problem.
Dan's constitution is derived from property rights:
It might be a good principle for handling disputes over unclear smartcontracts.
But how you can derive from property rights what is the best size for a block? Decisions like that will be much more common than diputes over badly behaving smartcontracts.
As always, good information with lots to think about and 'chew' over 😉