Governance
Analysis of Ranked Choice voting in 5.19 (Governance Distribution Pilot)
The DAO has voted and it has approved EP5.19 with the project having being set as a budget of 30k. Since I am a big governance geek and I have been vocal about my issues with Ranked Choice voting and its alternatives I’d like to analyze the resulting data. Before, I’d like to clarify that this is a debate on how different voting methods lead to different result and not a complaint about the result itself. I would have been writing this regardless of the outcome. In fact the choice I voted as my first choice did not win and there is no way of analyzing the data that it would’ve won. First, probably the best graphical analysis of the vote can be seen on…
Visualization of Money Flows between DAO Wallets
Since we are right now discussing the DAO’s new request of funds to the working groups I think it would be a good opportunity to analyze how the DAO has spent it’s money so far. First of all, how much money has the DAO received so far? Money In There are multiple ways to tell this story, measuring value in ether, or dollars, at the current time or then. The method I will be using will be to account only for USDC, ETH (and WETH) transfers and measure them at the day of the transfer. Almost 100 million dollars. That’s taking all the ether and USDC transactions coming into the address wallet.ensdao.eth at the time of their transfer. That of course doesn’t tell the whole story: it ignores all…
The failures of Instant Run-off voting from a Designer's perspective
Democracy is the heart of modern civilization, elections are the heart of democracy, and a voting system is at the heart of elections. While we can’t blame all modern illnesses on a improper vote counting algorithm, a failed one certainly ripples back its problem on all society. Luckily this isn’t just an academic argument anymore, with more countries and states experimenting with systems beyond First Past the Post and Two Round Systems. Unfortunately, many of those are now migrating to Instant run Off voting, which has so many flaws that it can spoil the whole movement for better voting. Much has been written on the failures of “ First Past the Post ” (the american presidency system) and…
Decentralization and governance
ENS aims to be both a decentralized domain and identity system and as such needs to be built to be censorship resistant and neutral. But to get there it needs an including community of builders in which all are welcome. That path is neither easy nor without its own conflicts. Long before Brantly joined ENS, there had been multiple other contributors, many of them queer, at least two were Trans. I only knew that the same way I found out about Brantly’s own deeply held beliefs: casual conversations over dinner in conferences around the world. As it should be: people’s work only judged by their own merit, independent of the contributors religion, skin tone, gender or country of origin. I think…
It’s time for social media interoperability
Social media is too important to be owned by a few private companies — or governments
Social media is already an integral part of our society, but it’s also ripping us apart. Unfortunately, both the diagnostic on what’s wrong and the solutions on how to fix them are increasingly divided into tribal lines, as are all the other issues that social media debates. Some “solutions” on the table might even worsen the problem by solidifying monopolies and giving them police powers. This essay proposes to sidestep the issue by separating social media itself — the act of citizens forming communities to share ideas — from social media companies, by allowing a common interoperable standard in which messages generated on one app could be transported and read in any other application,…
Sponsored Burning for TCR
Creating revenue for token curated registries members If you like reading about novel economic ideas in crypto (and since you’re reading this, I assume you do) then you are probably aware of “Token Curated Registries”, a token incentivization mechanism to help curate lists of stuff. The short version is that a given list (say, “best restaurants in town” or “funniest star wars prequel memes”) is maintained by a community of token holders which add new items by proposing a new entrant and making bets either the majority will accept that as part of the list. The incentive for small token holders is to only propose items they think are likely to be accepted by the majority (otherwise they’ll…
Token-Curating the Truth
Not all original ideas are good. In fact, often unoriginality is a better indication of a good idea. If multiple smart people have independently come up with similar solutions, thought it over and did not reject it outright, that might just one of the best filters for concepts. The glory of suceeding should never go to those who have ideas, but to those who sucessfully executed them, by grinding away at the practical problems, pivoting it in real world scenarios and turning it into a real thing that makes a small impact on other people’s lives. They are like farmers, who carefully tend to small fragile seeds, fight the pests and the elements until they become a real tree. Throwing ideas and…
Was the hard fork worth it?
Knowing everything I know today, I don’t think the hard fork was worth its many downsides. But I wouldn’t know most of that if not for the fork. Firstly, the White Hat hackers have shown to be extremely competent and I feel confident they would have been able to rescue at least 70%-90% of the funds back to dao token holders (as they did). They knew it was a possibility then, but they didn’t want that pressure on them. Also a Fork was sold as the “clean” option, the one that would solve the problem quickly so that everyone could get back to work. Instead the fork created arguments that persist to this day. While ETH/ETC communities have been mostly at peace, that animosity is still brought…
Recovering lost ether, past and future
I did not start this intending to write a little trilogy on the Parity Multisig hack and its efforts to recover it: I do however care a lot about the integrity of the ethereum community and I wanted to make an alert on the dangers related to a controversial split, and then I wanted to explore a more general opportunity to use the future reduction in ether issuance to deal with this and other similar issues in the future. Now I want to explore another idea that emerged from the last two ones on how to prevent a chain split. Here are my starting premises: Community splits are bad and should be avoided If a major client gives users the option to fork, then the end result will not be a popular…
Como aumentar a Representatividade mas diminuir os Representantes
Repescagem: uma forma de contabilizar os votos que une o melhor do voto distrital e proporcional e pode diminuir os gastos públicos Saiu o resultado da última eleição e você provavelmente está focado no que aconteceu no Executivo. Mas essa eleição, foi acaba de ser definida sua nova câmara municipal, que deveria ter um impacto grande no que acontece na sua cidade. E agora, você sabe quem te representa na câmara? Se o vereador que você votou foi eleito, parabéns, você está em uma minoria! Mas se você precisar que ele ou ela te represente em alguma coisa, você tem acesso ou a pessoa é popular e inalcançável demais pra isso? Se seu candidato não foi eleito, a pergunta fica mais complicada:…
The Truth about the Fork
I respect Ethereum’s Classic philosophical position, in fact I was among the first to be publically against the hard fork, and helped in all other ways to avoid it. Once I felt there was an overwhelming majority support for it (and after having helped build tools to try to measure these supports), and long debates to try to understand both arguments, I accepted — and still do, the majority decision as a good one. In fact, if the fork was merely a dogmatic schism I would be able to appreciate the beauty of the free market figuring out on two philosophical and political positions and no further words were needed. Except, that I care deeply about the truth. There is a common narrative in some…
Ethereum in practice part 2: how to build a better democracy in under a 100 lines of code
This is a second post on a series on how to use the current Ethereum tools to build smart contracts without needing programming experience. Download the latest version of the Ethereum Wallet, read the first part and let's have fun! Creating a token is fun, but what is the value of a token that doesn't do anything new? We are now going to create a new contract that uses the tokens we just created. The contract will be a Democratic organization that lives on the blockchain and that anyone holding a share token will be able to vote on proposals. So let's go back to " Contracts " and then " Deploy Contract " and paste the DAO source code on the "Solidity Source" field. Choose the contract…