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Analysis of a Dash Budget Proposal Vote

ericsammons

Well-known member
Masternode Owner/Operator
A few weeks ago I introduced my vote tracking tool, dashvotetracker.com, which includes a historical record of each Dash Budget System vote. Since that time, one proposal (Evan's "Budget System v2") has been submitted, and I thought it would be interesting to see how that vote has gone since its submission 11 days ago. At the time of this post, there are 905 "Yes" votes and 122 "No" votes for this Proposal, which means it will easily pass.

Here is a graph of the vote (a live version can be seen here):

samplegraph.png


As you can see from the graph, this Proposal very quickly received a good number of "Yes" votes, and since then has added an almost equally steady number of "Yes" and "No" votes. (Note: there is an odd blip in the graph on Feb 17th, which occurs in all the votes. For some reason, the API returned a significantly lower number of "Yes" votes and a higher number of "No" votes, then returned to its previous values a few minutes later. I'm not sure if that was a glitch in the reporting, or some Masternode voter who was changing their votes back and forth).

If we look more closely at the "Yes" votes, we see a few dramatic spikes (note that voting data is collected every 5 minutes):
  • On 2/8/16 at 4:55 PM (all times GMT), the "Yes" votes went from 8 to 106, then ten minutes later went from 106 to 140. So in about 15 minutes time, there were an additional 132 "Yes" votes.
  • On 2/8/16 at 8:50 PM, the "Yes" votes went from 164 to 212, adding 48 to the total.
  • On 2/9/16, starting at 10:30 AM, there was a big increase in the "Yes" votes:
    • At 10:30 AM, "Yes" votes went from 300 to 352, adding 52 to the total.
    • Ten minutes later, the vote went up to 440, adding another 88.
    • Five minutes later, it went up to 509, adding 69.
    • Ten minutes later, it went up to 593, adding 84.
    • Five minutes later, it went up to 636, adding 43.
    • Ten minutes later, it went up to 681, adding 45.
So in a total of 40 minutes, there were an additional 381 "Yes" votes made for the proposal. After this, there were two more significant spikes:​
  • On 2/9/16 at 1:50 PM (a few hours after the last spikes), the "Yes" votes went from 685 to 721, adding 36.
  • On 2/9/16 at 4:10 PM, the "Yes" votes went from 734 to 775, adding 41.
After that, the "Yes" votes were mostly just increased in small increments.

The "No" votes, on the other hand, had no real spikes in voting - it has basically been an incremental increase to 122 since its submission.

Now from the data that is collected, one cannot say for sure that spikes in voting are caused by one large Masternode owner voting all his MNs at once, but I think that is a reasonable conclusion. The other possibility is a lot of people decide in the same 5 minute time period to vote the same, which is possible, but less likely.

So assuming spikes are caused by individual Masternode owners voting all their votes at once (or very quickly in succession), it appears that a few whales are responsible for about 638 of the total 905 "Yes" votes (about 70% of the total). If you remove those votes, then the total would be 267 "Yes" and 122 "No", which would be 145 Net Votes, not enough to pass. Thus big whales most likely influenced this vote greatly.

Note that I am not saying that this influence is a good or bad thing; if anything, it is simply to be expected. As Dash is a very new technology, early adopters are going to have an oversized influence on it. And this can be seen in the voting on this particular Budget Proposal.
 
A few weeks ago I introduced my vote tracking tool, dashvotetracker.com, which includes a historical record of each Dash Budget System vote. Since that time, one proposal (Evan's "Budget System v2") has been submitted, and I thought it would be interesting to see how that vote has gone since its submission 11 days ago. At the time of this post, there are 905 "Yes" votes and 122 "No" votes for this Proposal, which means it will easily pass.

Here is a graph of the vote (a live version can be seen here):

samplegraph.png


As you can see from the graph, this Proposal very quickly received a good number of "Yes" votes, and since then has added an almost equally steady number of "Yes" and "No" votes. (Note: there is an odd blip in the graph on Feb 17th, which occurs in all the votes. For some reason, the API returned a significantly lower number of "Yes" votes and a higher number of "No" votes, then returned to its previous values a few minutes later. I'm not sure if that was a glitch in the reporting, or some Masternode voter who was changing their votes back and forth).

If we look more closely at the "Yes" votes, we see a few dramatic spikes (note that voting data is collected every 5 minutes):
  • On 2/8/16 at 4:55 PM (all times GMT), the "Yes" votes went from 8 to 106, then ten minutes later went from 106 to 140. So in about 15 minutes time, there were an additional 132 "Yes" votes.
  • On 2/8/16 at 8:50 PM, the "Yes" votes went from 164 to 212, adding 48 to the total.
  • On 2/9/16, starting at 10:30 AM, there was a big increase in the "Yes" votes:
    • At 10:30 AM, "Yes" votes went from 300 to 352, adding 52 to the total.
    • Ten minutes later, the vote went up to 440, adding another 88.
    • Five minutes later, it went up to 509, adding 69.
    • Ten minutes later, it went up to 593, adding 84.
    • Five minutes later, it went up to 636, adding 43.
    • Ten minutes later, it went up to 681, adding 45.
So in a total of 40 minutes, there were an additional 381 "Yes" votes made for the proposal. After this, there were two more significant spikes:​
  • On 2/9/16 at 1:50 PM (a few hours after the last spikes), the "Yes" votes went from 685 to 721, adding 36.
  • On 2/9/16 at 4:10 PM, the "Yes" votes went from 734 to 775, adding 41.
After that, the "Yes" votes were mostly just increased in small increments.

The "No" votes, on the other hand, had no real spikes in voting - it has basically been an incremental increase to 122 since its submission.

Now from the data that is collected, one cannot say for sure that spikes in voting are caused by one large Masternode owner voting all his MNs at once, but I think that is a reasonable conclusion. The other possibility is a lot of people decide in the same 5 minute time period to vote the same, which is possible, but less likely.

So assuming spikes are caused by individual Masternode owners voting all their votes at once (or very quickly in succession), it appears that a few whales are responsible for about 638 of the total 905 "Yes" votes (about 70% of the total). If you remove those votes, then the total would be 267 "Yes" and 122 "No", which would be 145 Net Votes, not enough to pass. Thus big whales most likely influenced this vote greatly.

Note that I am not saying that this influence is a good or bad thing; if anything, it is simply to be expected. As Dash is a very new technology, early adopters are going to have an oversized influence on it. And this can be seen in the voting on this particular Budget Proposal.

Interesting analysis! One thing to remember is that Dashwhale (and I believe dashman as well) have incorporated time-lagged voting. This creates another few possibilities:

a) Due to either a bug or simple coincidence, some of the smaller holders' time-lagged votes all hit around the same time.
b) There may be an additional whale or two that aren't noticed due to this time-lagged voting.

You are probably still correct in your conclusions; just a couple of additional possibilities though.
 
A few weeks ago I introduced my vote tracking tool, dashvotetracker.com, which includes a historical record of each Dash Budget System vote. Since that time, one proposal (Evan's "Budget System v2") has been submitted, and I thought it would be interesting to see how that vote has gone since its submission 11 days ago. At the time of this post, there are 905 "Yes" votes and 122 "No" votes for this Proposal, which means it will easily pass.

Here is a graph of the vote (a live version can be seen here):

samplegraph.png


As you can see from the graph, this Proposal very quickly received a good number of "Yes" votes, and since then has added an almost equally steady number of "Yes" and "No" votes. (Note: there is an odd blip in the graph on Feb 17th, which occurs in all the votes. For some reason, the API returned a significantly lower number of "Yes" votes and a higher number of "No" votes, then returned to its previous values a few minutes later. I'm not sure if that was a glitch in the reporting, or some Masternode voter who was changing their votes back and forth).

If we look more closely at the "Yes" votes, we see a few dramatic spikes (note that voting data is collected every 5 minutes):
  • On 2/8/16 at 4:55 PM (all times GMT), the "Yes" votes went from 8 to 106, then ten minutes later went from 106 to 140. So in about 15 minutes time, there were an additional 132 "Yes" votes.
  • On 2/8/16 at 8:50 PM, the "Yes" votes went from 164 to 212, adding 48 to the total.
  • On 2/9/16, starting at 10:30 AM, there was a big increase in the "Yes" votes:
    • At 10:30 AM, "Yes" votes went from 300 to 352, adding 52 to the total.
    • Ten minutes later, the vote went up to 440, adding another 88.
    • Five minutes later, it went up to 509, adding 69.
    • Ten minutes later, it went up to 593, adding 84.
    • Five minutes later, it went up to 636, adding 43.
    • Ten minutes later, it went up to 681, adding 45.
So in a total of 40 minutes, there were an additional 381 "Yes" votes made for the proposal. After this, there were two more significant spikes:​
  • On 2/9/16 at 1:50 PM (a few hours after the last spikes), the "Yes" votes went from 685 to 721, adding 36.
  • On 2/9/16 at 4:10 PM, the "Yes" votes went from 734 to 775, adding 41.
After that, the "Yes" votes were mostly just increased in small increments.

The "No" votes, on the other hand, had no real spikes in voting - it has basically been an incremental increase to 122 since its submission.

Now from the data that is collected, one cannot say for sure that spikes in voting are caused by one large Masternode owner voting all his MNs at once, but I think that is a reasonable conclusion. The other possibility is a lot of people decide in the same 5 minute time period to vote the same, which is possible, but less likely.

So assuming spikes are caused by individual Masternode owners voting all their votes at once (or very quickly in succession), it appears that a few whales are responsible for about 638 of the total 905 "Yes" votes (about 70% of the total). If you remove those votes, then the total would be 267 "Yes" and 122 "No", which would be 145 Net Votes, not enough to pass. Thus big whales most likely influenced this vote greatly.

Note that I am not saying that this influence is a good or bad thing; if anything, it is simply to be expected. As Dash is a very new technology, early adopters are going to have an oversized influence on it. And this can be seen in the voting on this particular Budget Proposal.

If you do these for all the big proposals you'd be a god around these parts!

We are sorely lacking transparency within areas such as voting and proposals.
 
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