Hello everyone
I'm sorry to be putting forward a less-than-flattering commentary on this whole process of voting via our MNs but, as theoretically pure and balanced as it is, I can't see this working.
In many democracies around the world, when there's a referendum on some critical issue that requires the voting populace to vote 'YES", those referendums are rarely carried through by the YES voters, the normal outcome is NO, because groups opposing the YES create so much FUD and confusion about potential downside of voting YES, the NOs often unequivocally win from the sheer inertia of the YES vote needing a massive proportion of the voting public that will even take enough interest to carry the motion. An example is Australia where there have been around 44 referendums since federation in 1900 and only 8 of those were carried
It comes from the fact that there'll only ever be a percentage of people that are interested in either a firm YES or NO. For argument's sake, let's say that percentage of people who actually have a view is 75% (which I think is potentially on the high side; in many democracies where life's relatively easy it's likely to be far less) that generally means the 25% who don't hold a view are simply either not going to turn up to the polling booth on the day or leave their ballot paper blank (which is effectively a NO) or just vote NO because either they don't understand what's being voted on or they don't care. So for a YES to be carried, it needs to be voted by more than 66% of that 75% (to get the overall vote above 50%) and this is where the great challenge of most referendums is. To get more than 66% of people voting to vote YES is often a monumental task for the YES campaign. And like I've noted, in reality it's probably much higher than 66% of all voters needing to vote YES as there's likely to be many more people not voting at all than the 25% I've suggested above.
And this is the challenge we're going to have with this whole concept. There will be masternode owners that have jumped straight in and voted immediately, there will be others who're still considering the proposal and discussing aspects of it on these forums prior to voting, there'll be others still thinking "I must get onto that" and a fourth type who haven't even heard about it yet because they're not consistently on these forums. For a proposal to carry, it needs to have a massive YEA vote because there are so many MNs that will just be left at ABSTAIN.
I think we're seeing this phenomenon in the figures already. According to Elbereth's Dashninja MN votes page YEA is currently 28.1%, NAY is 0.2% and ABSTAIN is 71.7%. The sheer inertia involved of needing every MN owner to act and cast their vote is going to make it almost impossible to get YEA votes carried and I'll be surprised if even this first "Self-sustainable Decentralized Governance by Blockchain" proposal to set the whole budgeting system in place is going to be carried.
Maybe we need to think of other ways to do this as I can't see this working effectively for this or future votes on proposals.
