I would like to discuss the following blog entry:
@hiveio/hive-hardfork-24-upcoming-release-candidate-testnet-other-info
"30 day cooldown time on newly powered up HP for governance voting.
The Hive governance system is made up of both witness voting and DHF voting. When additional new funds are powered up, their weight will NOT count towards governance voting for the following 30 days. This adds a healthy buffer period to any potential malicious coordinated takeover attempt which allows the community a chance to respond, and is an important yet reasonable safeguard to help prevent attacks via funds stored on exchanges without impacting funds in any way."
I do not know what the author has in mind, but I do not understand his view that coins are not disadvantaged if the voting right that is normally inherent to them is withdrawn for a certain period of time.
If one coin has a voting weight and the other one does not then this is a disadvantage, e.g. In the case of stock corporations, the preferred shares are provided with a minimum dividend and very often also with an additional dividend to compensate for the disadvantage that they have no voting rights.
But here an investor is told that he has only one disadvantage, namely no voting rights for 30 days, without any compensation - great thing!
Above all, from my point of view this is completely unnecessary, because the fact that an investor with 50% + 0.001 HIVE can actually determine the 30 top witnesses is only thanks to the electoral system that is widespread here, that ultimately follows the American electoral system with "The Winner take it all ".
If in a vote for a German parliament, a party has received 50% + 1 vote, it will hardly have 30 out of 30 seats.
So where is the problem and how can you solve it?
Now the problem lies in the combination of two peculiarities of the actual voting system:
- Everyone has 30 votes.
- Everyone can give each witness only one vote.
So it would be so easy to solve this problem in two ways:
- Reduction of witness voices.
- Possibility to accumulate votes.
Obviously, the top widnesses here are not interested in such reforms, since they could no longer be sure of staying in their top places.
Let's take a look at how these options are e.g. would affect the possibilities of a handler if we assume that 85% of the top 20 witnesses (so my information is - if this is wrong - please correct it) I have to agree to a handler so that it can be achieved.
Current:
- An investor with 50% + 0.001 HIVE chooses 30 witnesses and they occupy positions 1-30 even if they don't get any votes from anyone else.
With 1 witness vote per account:
Instead of 50% + 0.001 HIVE to be safely among the Top 30 Witnesses, suddenly 5% is enough to safely reach a place among the Top 20 Witnesses.
In this respect, a blocking minority would already exist with 20% of the votes (certainly 4 out of 20 witnesses from the top 20).
With accumulation of votes:
Here you can of course discuss all possible scenarios, but if you assume that you can give the 30 votes to 30 different witnesses or to only one witness all 30 votes or any combination between this, you will also find out that in this case 5% is enough for your Witness to be in the top 20 or 20% for a blocking minority of 4 witnesses.
So there are two good alternatives to not allow a new investor with 50% + 0.001 HIVE of capital to determine the top 20 (or top 30) witnesses alone.
In both cases, this would require more than 80% for 17 from 20 witnesses instead of 50% + 0.001 HIVE for 20 of 20 (or 30 of 30) witnesses - so why this regulation, which naturally disadvantages new investors?