Hey, excited to see this proposal being discussed and about the Snapshot + Aragon integration in general. I work at Aragon One, so noting the obvious bias, I do think this solution is a solid way to further decentralized yearn’s governance and reduce risks for both multisig holders and token holders.
Making these prohibitively expensive if judged wrong seems completely counterintuitive to your organisations principles, specifically that of free and fair access.
In order to prevent illegitimate actions it’s important that taking those actions comes at a significant cost, otherwise the system would not be particularly effective.
Free and fair access in this case, isn’t that the mechanism is free to use, but that nobody is restricted or disadvantaged in their use of the solution.
This seems to suggest that only someone with significant financial assets, and willing to possibly loose some, can challenge decisions. It also means that someone with ‘fuck you’ levels of money can still challenge actions that are detrimental to them to cause disruption to the wider ecosystem while delaying implementation of proposals (for their own benefit).
I think this hits on a really important point. When you challenge an action, you are delaying a proposal from being executed, if you can do this at low cost it becomes possible to grief the community by slowing down the proposal process.
There is a natural tension here between making it cheap to raise disputes and cause delays, and the desire to execute proposals efficiently.
Not to mention, creating a system dependant on rational actors is inherently flawed, as humans are often irrational (or just wrong). This seems like a key design flaw in your proposal.
While no system is perfect, I think one of the big advantages of decentralized systems is their resilience and robustness in the face of irrational, wrong, malicious or otherwise unexpected actions of various actors.
The status quo depends on and entrusts security to multisig holders, even if we assume that they are honest and will continue to remain so, as the value they secure with their keys increases they become more and more vulnerable as individuals to attacks from others.
Moving to a more decentralized model, helps to reduce these risks and creates checks and balances between multisig holders, token holders, and a decentralized third party (Aragon Court).
The economic deterrent does make sense, but rather than having one actor be able to challenge it, how about requiring a certain about of collateral staked to challenge proposals? I would suggest that there exist a threshold of capital that must be reached to activate the Aragon court, and that any one person can contribute to it, but it would require $X from X amount of people in order to be effective.
While not currently implemented, the ability to crowdfund dispute fees via a smart contract is totally doable, and I agree that having the option for multiple people to pool funds/risk would be beneficial.
You could further democratise using quadratic voting ( see this primer by Vitalik Buterin ). In that $1=1 vote, $25 = 5 votes, $100 - 10 votes etc. This would further decrease the potential for whales to have outsized influence on governance decisions and incentivize more community action which is what this space is all about.
I would love to see something like this but would have concerns about how to implement in a way that is sybil resistant, because if its not sybil resistant that it isn’t really fair and the actual security provided becomes much harder to quantify.