I had a good conversation on the Discord server with someone about the voting power a few whales had on YIP 30, ultimately swinging the vote in the last hour or so of voting.
He proposed an idea, more like sketched it out, that could give more voting power to the average YFI holder and less power to those that hold an insane amount of the governance token.
What if we reduced the voting power of holders that have greater than x amount of the governance token so that future YIPs aren’t determined by a handful of people? I’m not sure on the details of the weighted distribution of voting power but I want to at least get this conversation started just in case anyone else thinks it’s a legitimate issue, otherwise we’ll be stuck with a few people determining all of the proposals from here on out while the rest of us are watching the project play out in a predetermined way.
The solution for the average YFI holder to sway the vote is to (a) create quality proposals that can gain widespread acceptance and maybe even excitement and (b) vote whatever YFI you have – in the aggregate those small holdings add up.
I doubt this would be popular, but one potential solution would be to halve the voting power (not the YFI) of the top 50% of wallets and distribute it evenly to the entire voting base for every vote. It would not prevent Sybil attacks but it would make them very expensive in terms of gas and time costs.
Quadratic voting, where you can make n votes in either direction at a cost of n^2, is right in the middle between these two extremes, and creates the perfect balance.
And on another thread, sortition is mentioned, using random selection paired with quadratic voting, a good read:
While it’s certainly worth discussing various options such as Quadratic Voting to help ensure that control of YFI doesn’t get too centralized, I think it’s a false equivalency to think that whales have too much influence just because the YIP-30 vote swung to NO relatively late in the process.
If the same whales that (presumably) voted NO towards the end of the proposal had simply voted earlier, the general impression would have been much different. Namely that there wasn’t a lot of voting support for YIP-30.
I imagine the final votes came in towards the deadline partially because of the changeup in v2 fee staking starting on 8/1, and partly because it was a tough decision. While @Substreight 50k model was a good model, as I have said in several posts and as @rewkang pointed out on twitter it’s still kind of early to decide and vote on a definitive issuance model. yVaults are still being finalized, ySwap has huge potential but doesn’t seem to be fully online and ready to be promoted yet etc.
Again a discussion of various voting models can’t hurt, but I think it’s incorrect to jump to the conclusion that whales have an overly large influence simply because many votes came in towards the end of voting.
And just for the record I voted yes for YIP-30 and am not a whale.
