should people with multiple masternodes receive an economical incentive to always only vote once?

[UdjinM6]

No because it creates higher centralization. If you have more masternodes than others, you can gobble up more Dash quicker than the others. Unfair, if that became the case, masternodes would create a masternode group shares to increase profits. which wouldn't make sense.

Personally I think that nodes should be just like miners. Free to run, and incentivized. from the knowledge Iv learned, nodes will automatically be required to run better equipment, if the equipment isn't qualified than you are off the network. So I don't think collateralizing is the incentive structure we need, just need a good payout based upon actual work nodes will do for us. Right now it's a very low amount of work for a very large reward. we pay $6.3 million to masternodes monthly to provide a $45,000 service.
The math: 4500 nodes
payout a month 7 Dash = about $1400
$1400 x 4500 = $6.3 million
Server cost a month = $10
$10 x 4500 = $45,000

Honestly, why not take 70% funding from nodes for now to increase treasury funds? About $4 million more a month for funding? Masternodes do not need the money to run their services.

I guess some can say the extra money left over that masternodes collect is labor fees for voting lol, idk. I look at it from a business perspective, I see we are over paying. In the beginning masternodes barely made profit, I think they made around $20 a month. it's gone sky high now with no increase in productivity from nodes. Unless we create a forever changing rate of rewards to costs I can see it being acceptable. A system that automatically changes the difficulty level requirement based on price movements. I think that would be needed for collateralized nodes to make sense.

Just my personal thoughts on the subject.

https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/economics-how-should-dash-stay-competitive.15438/

 

[djcrypto]

I don't think "guessing number of beans" is anyway relevant to voting yes or no on proposals.

IMO if you're smart enough to have lots of masternodes, you're smart enough to vote in a representative fashion.

Rewarding whales more than minnows will incentivize centralization and a take-over - we don't want that.

If there becomes a problem with voting blocks rejecting reasonable proposals, something will have to done.

Cross that bridge if we get there, IMO.

 

[Pietro Speroni]

Not sure if she ever did such a claim but I'll let her correct me

For me personally, Dash is decentralized organization/governance and definitely not a democracy/government. At least curently I honestly don't see any issues with people putting money where their mouth is and having more voting power for putting more on stake.

Thanks for your answer @UdjinM6. Just please do not advertise it as Wisdom of the Crowd as it is not using this.

Yes, this can lead to a corruption in legacy systems but imo the reason for this outcome is not the money and the power itself, the reason is that legacy systems are closed ones and hard to escape - they don't have direct feedback loop on the decisions that are being made and often there is no choice really, you have to leave with whatever was decided by those in power. In digital/crypto it's all open, you can "abandon the ship" in minutes and that will have the most direct impact on those who has the largest stake. The have to think twice (and then think once again) before doing smth stupid or harmful.

For now . Just wait until the winner crypto gets established, and the possibility to leave will be, de facto, irrelevant.

In any case thanks to all for your input. I feel I understand this community a bit better. I still will open my second masternode .

 

[Pietro Speroni]

I've previously suggested something very similar. In my case, I think declared clusters of MNs should get more dash but less voting power. If they want more voting power then they simply don't declare clusters.

Dear @GrandMasterDash , do you think you could find that suggestion? I would be interested in reading the discussion that came out.

 

[GrandMasterDash]

Dear @GrandMasterDash , do you think you could find that suggestion? I would be interested in reading the discussion that came out.

I didn't find the post but I did find one comment I had made in Sep 2016:

"Allow each MN to choose a reward-vote ratio (RVR). Imagine a sliding scale from 0 to 1. Each MN could request a maximum reward (1) but they would subsequently have zero voting power. At the other extreme, a MN could request maximum voting power (0) and receive no reward. And, of course, being a sliding-scale, any number inbetween.. say, 0.6 (thus receiving 0.6 reward and only 0.4 voting power)."

https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/masternodes-and-volume.10807/#post-104710​

I also found this quote of mine from Aug 2016:

"What if there was a system that gave higher payouts to people that proved they had control over more MNs, but equally gave them less weight in voting? That way people would have a clear decision of what was more important; more voting power vs more income"

https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/...e-to-vote-with-number.9081/page-2#post-102473​

 

[akhavr]

Now, the question is, do companies when they make their decision make better decisions than the wisdom of the crowd would provide.

Please, define "better decisions" formally in this context? Thanks

 

[Pietro Speroni]

Please, define "better decisions" formally in this context? Thanks

Great question, thanks.

I would say a decision A is better than a decision B if the outcome is more in line with the vision and mission of the company, as well as it is more economically sound. As this is a complex evaluation with several elements sometimes it is not possible to clearly define a decision as clearly better than another (it might be better in some respect and worse in others, thus laying in the Pareto Front). But generally speaking we can simplify the problem by saying that whoever has more predictive power over what will happen using one policy or another will generally navigate the space of decisions better.

Now the Wisdom of the Crowds has shown itself to be a tool able to make really good predictions (for example you should read how it was used to find a lost u-boat). There will always be experts that beat the WotC. But we cannot, unfortunately, know which expert will in a specific case reach a better result than the WotC.

Again, thanks for the question that permitted me to clarify this important point

 

[akhavr]

I would say a decision A is better than a decision B if the outcome is more in line with the vision and mission of the company, as well as it is more economically sound. As this is a complex evaluation with several elements sometimes it is not possible to clearly define a decision as clearly better than another (it might be better in some respect and worse in others, thus laying in the Pareto Front). But generally speaking we can simplify the problem by saying that whoever has more predictive power over what will happen using one policy or another will generally navigate the space of decisions better.

The intractable problem is that, in the multiagent system, even given the agents have the same information and skills (predictive power), the reward function might be different. Then, add to the mix the difference in the information available, the capacity to process the information, the skills difference, etc..

So far I don't know any management structure in history, that would solve that problem better, than a corporation. Shareholders pool their capital together towards a goal, elect board of directors to hire and oversee management. If the vision of shareholders (reward function) diverges, they either exit by selling out or branch out another corp. In crypto world, shareholders either sell tokens, or fork the project, or both.

By adjusting the share in the company I may become more or less related to the collective corporate reward function and *this* is the way it is created. So, it *is* WotC, but in a different way than you've outlined in the initial post.

Just my 2 duffs

 

[Pietro Speroni]

So far I don't know any management structure in history, that would solve that problem better, than a corporation.

It has, indeed, never been tried before.

 

[demo]

So far I don't know any management structure in history, that would solve that problem better, than a corporation. Shareholders pool their capital together towards a goal, elect board of directors to hire and oversee management.

You are not a corporation. You are not a company. You are not a commodity. You are not collectible items, stamps, paintings or collective underwears of hot starlets. You are not....bla bla bla.

YOU ARE MONEY!!!! Please always try to remember that. Money has not only economical aspects, but also political aspects and military aspects.

Some people are trying to degredate the cryptocurrencies to ordinary commodities , to ordinary corporations or companies, to ordinary collectible items which depend on the state's currency and policy, while some other people are trying to ugrade the cryptocurrencies to real money.

What is happening with cryptocurrencies has never happened in history before. By all means, please dont try to solve new problems with old recipes.

 

[Friend]

Similarly letting people see how other people voted tend to bias the result making the wisdom of the crowd oracle less precise.

Agree.
What could be the solution to this? Do you think, that it would be better, to hide MN votes, for some time, before deadline?

However two issues bothers me. (Please, correct me if I am wrong!)

Deciding who are the experts, or who are the person who are more invested and giving them more vote does not increase the probability that the median reaches the results. If it does something it biases the result in favour of the people more invested making the median slide further away from the optimal result.

• 1. Isn’t it the same with lowering the number of participants? You also get lower chance to optimal result.

Effect is even stronger with lower granulation: i.e. grains of sand in jar, instead beans.

What I mean is, how crucial is this problem? How close to the exact number, we have to be?

• 2. With every MN "whale" on the one side of being wrong, you get (statistically) one in the opposite direction. So, as mentioned above, you just end up with the same result, as lowering the number of participants.

"Wisdom of the crowd" works fine with 50, 100 people (also depends on granulation of the substance in jar). We have 4000+ MN.
How many, and how rich “whales” should there be, to disturb the result relevantly?

(Love to see the outcome of your computer simulation on this.)

 

[Pietro Speroni]

Agree.
What could be the solution to this? Do you think, that it would be better, to hide MN votes, for some time, before deadline?

However two issues bothers me. (Please, correct me if I am wrong!)

• 1. Isn’t it the same with lowering the number of participants? You also get lower chance to optimal result.

Effect is even stronger with lower granulation: i.e. grains of sand in jar, instead beans.

What I mean is, how crucial is this problem? How close to the exact number, we have to be?

In many of those experiments people had something to gain by voting well. If you let people who have too less invested in dash vote you can get people voting randomy. Or worse, as @demo keeps suggesting people joining and being paid just to make wrong decisions to help some other currencies. So the idea of putting a threashold I think is a good idea. What exactly should be the threashold is not clear and I think nobody really knows. 1000 dash looks good. Maybe 100 could also work, as well as 2000 or 3000. If we knew how many dash has each person we could draw a nice graph where as the threashold raises you see the number of masternodes decrease. And then you would see that there are some numbers after which you really cannot do it. If the threashold is at 10000 or 100000 maybe there would be only 5 or 10 people and the decision would end up like the usual old boys club.

On the other side we don't need so many people. All the experiments I did showed how the median tended to stabilise quite soon. When you have 100 people it's nearly enough. With 1000 people, all that have invested a significant amount (like now, to own a masternode you have basically invested the cost of an apartment) I would say the quality of the decision should be quite good. Honestly, I don't think if you are trying to judge the number of grains of sand in the jar, and you ask everybody in the World to bet, and you offer 1 milion to the person that voted nearest the actual number. I am not convinced that asking 7 billion people (everybody in the world) or 7 million people (one persone every 1000 randomly picked) will change the median that much (or at all). You will find someone who is nearer in the 7 billion case, but I don't think the median will actually change. Unfortunately you cannot just try to find who the best people in the 7 billion would be and only ask them.

• 2. With every MN "whale" on the one side of being wrong, you get (statistically) one in the opposite direction. So, as mentioned above, you just end up with the same result, as lowering the number of participants.

"Wisdom of the crowd" works fine with 50, 100 people (also depends on granulation of the substance in jar). We have 4000+ MN.
How many, and how rich “whales” should there be, to disturb the result relevantly?

good question. The more rich wales there are the less the result is disturbed. The few rich wales there are with a lot of masternodes the more it is disturbed. In other words: imagine you have 1000 simple masternode (1 owner) and 1 person owning 100 masternode by himself. He can really disturb the result as his judgment will move 10% of the votes. Instead imagine you have 900 simple masternodes, and 50 people owning 4 masternodes each, then the result will be fine. The whales will cancel each other.

Of course to study this very well it would be good if we could know how many people with multiple masternodes are there. And how many masternode they have. Then we could simulate it. I remember that when @demo made a proposal on PIVX and he told us that it was going well until one person said "no!" and 400 votes were added against his proposal I the sold all my PIVX. This level of "whalery" does not work well with any form of collective decision making. Whoever is the owner of those 400 masternodes, owns de fact PIVX, which is basically his own private toy. Not interested.

(Love to see the outcome of your computer simulation on this.)

If I made such a simulation, how should I simulate the decision of the participants respect to how many votes they have?
It actually would be interesting to try different formula. I even suspect that even if the owners of multiple masternode were linearly more precise in their evaluation respect to how many MN they own, still the result would end up biased. But it also would depend on the kind of vote used. Right now with yes/abstain/no vote it is quite easy to get the "right" answer. The WotC is usually applied on unidimensional situation where you need to decide where to aim for. Which are harder problems. But the Dash community has already decided they are not interested in this kind of voting. So it is quite pointless to simulate it. At least for Dash.

 

[demo]

What could be the solution to this? Do you think, that it would be better, to hide MN votes, for some time, before deadline?

Personally I think that hiding the MN votes is not a good idea. I am a proponent of visible votes. Game theory works better with visible votes.

It doesnt matter what you personally think and beleive, it is most important what others think and believe. You should vote taking into account the others' opinions and beliefs, thats why visible votes (that can change whenever the voters wish) are more usefull and more accurate in order for someone to hit his target and fulfill his goal.

Visible votes facilitates tactical voting. Visible votes allows you to hit your target optimously and as close as the opinion of the others allows.

 

[Pietro Speroni]

Personally I think that hiding the MN votes is not a good idea. I am a proponent of visible votes. Game theory works better with visible votes.

It doesnt matter what you personally think and beleive, it is most important what others think and believe. You should vote taking into account the others' opinions and beliefs, thats why visible votes (that can change whenever the voters wish) are more usefull and more accurate in order for someone to hit his target and fulfill his goal.

Visible votes facilitates tactical voting. Visible votes allows you to hit your target optimously and as close as the opinion of the others allows.

Hi @demo please read the peer reviewed paper:
How social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect.

You can still make the vote visible at the end of the vote. And we found in Vilfredo a good solution where people voted first without being allowed to see the other people's vote. And then they could see it after they have voted. They still had the possibility to change their vote, but having already voted they would be consciously doing it after seeing how other people have voted. Which made the influence conscious and not unconscious.

 

[demo]

Hi @demo please read the peer reviewed paper:
How social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect.

You can still make the vote visible at the end of the vote. And we found in Vilfredo a good solution where people voted first without being allowed to see the other people's vote. And then they could see it after they have voted. They still had the possibility to change their vote, but having already voted they would be consciously doing it after seeing how other people have voted. Which made the influence conscious and not unconscious.

IMO vote should never end. Polls should always be active and ready to receive more votes, and their current result should be applied as it is.

But if you want to separate the vote in two stages, the first stage having non visible votes and the second stage having visible votes, this is interesting.
Because it will reveal which method. the visible or the invisible votes, results more rational outcome.

Rationality is something much more complicated than predicting the beans in a jar. It requires many interdependacies, which play a very critical role in the final outcome. Rationality requires total visibility, anything obscure is against it.

I am not a proponent of the wisdom of the crowd, neither a proponent of the predicting capabilities of the crowd. I am a proponent of the rationality of the crowd. The crowd cannot become wise, neither can become a prophet. It can become rational though.

 

[jimbursch]

@Pietro Speroni and @demo

Can what you guys are proposing be modeled something like an open company with something like shareholders (collective decision makers)?

For example, let's use DashIncubator (https://d-msg.com/dashincubator) as an example. At DashIncubator, project leaders submit projects to backers who each decide how much they want to pledge toward the proposal fee. When a project gets 5 Dash in backing , the proposal is formally submitted for the Dash Budget. If the proposal passes, the backers are paid back double, if the proposal fails, the backers get nothing back.

For this to scale up, we need a mechanism in place that decides which projects are good enough to submit to backers. This is where I think we can model what you guys are proposing.

 

[Pietro Speroni]

@Pietro Speroni and @demo

Can what you guys are proposing be modeled something like an open company with something like shareholders (collective decision makers)?

For example, let's use DashIncubator (https://d-msg.com/dashincubator) as an example. At DashIncubator, project leaders submit projects to backers who each decide how much they want to pledge toward the proposal fee. When a project gets 5 Dash in backing , the proposal is formally submitted for the Dash Budget. If the proposal passes, the backers are paid back double, if the proposal fails, the backers get nothing back.

For this to scale up, we need a mechanism in place that decides which projects are good enough to submit to backers. This is where I think we can model what you guys are proposing.

Thanks @jimbursch . I read your other post with interest and upvoted your proposal for the video as masternode owner.
Let me start to say that I really love your idea. Because you took a problem and made it into an occasion for some business. And some community building.
Now you are suggesting to use some decision system to decide which proposals to submit.

Basically the simplest decision making system would simply be to let everybody invest in any project they want. And any project that reach 5 dash get submitted. And any project that does not reach 5 dash waits. And people in any moment can take back their pledge thus making a very natural way to work. No external rules necessary.

I feel this system would already work perfectly fine. You can even decide that after 1 year if a proposal never reached 5 dash all the money are sent back. But you don't even need to do that . Also a simple filter is that project with 0 backers are filtered out, and whoever is writing a proposal must insert a tiny amount. So the moment the last person takes away the pledge the proposal is filtered out.

This sounds like a very natural system. No external threasholds or weird formula that need to be justified.

But of course it is not using the WofC.

To really use the Wisdom of the Crowd you would have to have people vote a number. And people have something to gain from getting the number right. What could be the number?

Maybe people could bet something tiny (1 dollar in dash) how many masternode will vote in favour of that proposal. And if the proposal is submitted whoever is nearer wins the whole stack of dash from all the other votes. While the median of the votes will be a really good hint suggesting how the proposal will go.

Would that fit your needs?

(And obviously you need to take the median and not the mean or someone can just bet at the end throwing in a very high number just to make the mean look really high so more people are prone to support the proposal)

 

[ec1warc1]

Hi @demo! It is always nice to see the money eating logo! Hope you are well.

Anyway, so much thought has gone into this poll. It is an interesting thread. I think people should be free to take economic risks and reap the rewards, including voting power. There may be a very few people with many masternodes and thus a skewing of the decision power in their favor. However, I don't think any one user has enough voting power to overrule a majority of MNOs whose opinion is in opposition. Privacy is also an important aspect. No one needs to know how many MNs a MNO has.

 

[jimbursch]

Also a simple filter is that project with 0 backers are filtered out, and whoever is writing a proposal must insert a tiny amount. So the moment the last person takes away the pledge the proposal is filtered out.

THAT'S and really good idea I hadn't thought of! Thanks!

To really use the Wisdom of the Crowd you would have to have people vote a number. And people have something to gain from getting the number right. What could be the number?

Ahh, now I understand what you guys are talking about. I'll have to think about it.

 

[Pietro Speroni]

Ahh, now I understand what you guys are talking about.

indeed there's a method in my madness ;-)