How to completely eliminate EOS bribery?
PART Ⅰ
Introduction
Recently, the EOS community has continued to discuss the issue of EOS voting bribery.
My opinion is: We all know voting bribery will be harmful for the EOS system, however, I don’t think we can use governance to resolve it. Reasons are as follows:
(1) 、Firstly, It is technically difficult to distinguish the proxy voter、 Entrusted Investment clients and the BP shareholders. Because the design of the EOS token cannot allow to separate the vote rights with property rights.
(2)、 Therefore, it is not a problem with the HUOBI pool itself. From the perspective of investors, the HUOBI pool has contributed a lot to the prosperity of the EOS community.
(3)、If we can’t eliminate voting bribery from technically and practically, the answer is not how to prevent bribery. But how to lead bribery to be rationalization.
If you have any questions about the above three points, please be patient and read my thoughts, I don’t need you judge my value right or wrong, but I hope it will lead you to a deep thought.
PART Ⅱ
How do you define EOS bribery?
Proxy Voters:
There are many people who don’t want to vote by themselves, because EOS is just a commercial project, not a referendum on the presidential election or Brexit, not so politically serious. I am too lazy to choose BPs, and I entrust others to help me choose, can I? Especially EOS, I feel at ease when tokens deposit in the exchange rather than in wallet. Isn’t it free will that the community members to authorize a proxy vote? You cannot force me to vote. Also, when proxy voting, I also do not want to give up the rights of value increasement of my property. What’s more, If I can keep the value increasement of my property while I can also keep my rights of vote, I would love to do so.
Entrusted Investment clients:
EOS white paper promised that EOS is just like a land, a house, EOS tokens can be rented like a house to get income. Such as RAM, CPU. At present, the rental and sales of these rights have begun to be popular. For example, Chintai developed by EOS42, BANCOR system of Eos RAM, etc. Ordinary holders to handle these businesses from their EOS property are difficult. If they authorize these businesses to professional institutions like EOS42 to handle it, entrusting financial management, isn’t it a good business model? I just want my tokens (money) to have a bit of interest, can’t I? In addition, it is quite normal to entrust EOS assets to a professional quantitative trade team to get financial gains. It’s reasonable to allow individual holders to get interest from EOS token.
Now if HUOBI Pool said: we are just a wealth management agency; our clients authorize us to use their tokens to do anything. Then we use part of these tokens to vote for the BPs, including HUOBI Pool BP. But the interests we return to clients, not come from BP’s salary, it’s from somewhere else, like rent or quantitative trade. Can you still say its bribery?
What’s more, if they emphasis that HUOBI Pool and HUOBI Pool BP are two different organization, HUOBI Pool BP didn’t give any feedback to HUOBI pool, then the bribery behavior disappears (without third party audit, you cannot just trust the financial information HUOBI Pool BP revealed).
BP shareholders:
The BPs own tokens and votes must be come from the BP shareholders. You cannot deny that BP has shareholders and there is no limit of number of shareholders that a BP could have. Then, if I put my tokens in the HUOBI pool, can I be counted into a shareholder of HUOBI pool? If you say, no, because the shareholders are permanent. Well, even if the BPs disclose its own shareholders, you cannot stop the BP to change its shareholders, also you cannot require BP to keep shareholders stable. Besides, we cannot trust the information disclosure by BP if it’s not been audited by lawyer and accountant.
The HUOBI Pool at least require the clients to lock the tokens in four different periods from 7 days to 3 months, which is very clear. What’s more, the financial disclosure level of HUOBI Pool right now is far exceeds than any BPs. You can check this on the financial statements of HUOBI Pool.
PART Ⅲ
There is no way to separate proxy voters、entrusted investment clients and BP shareholders.
So far, have you found out where the problem is? Right, because the system design of EOS cannot prevent the transfer of voting rights, resulting in the three identities of proxy voters、 entrusted investment clients and BP shareholders can easily become the object of bribery, no one can wash their suspicions.
But, can we separate the vote rights with property rights? Or, can we forbid any kind of vote proxy? Can EOS be designed into that the voting rights cannot be transferred? The sad truth is, we can’t. No matter in technique or business practical. Because EOS token has a strong asset attributes, it must be circulated in the market, including its property rights and vote rights, Because the rights to vote is to protect our property rights!
BM developed REX, I think it is good, but if you develop another kind of related token like “EOSvote”, on behalf of EOS voting rights. Then you mortgage your EOS token to the system then you get “EOSvote” token, which can circulate in the market, it is directly encouragement of trading voting. (of course, It is also can be kind of experiment).
The conclusion is that EOS’s voting rights bind with EOS property rights and cannot be divided. There is no way to separate proxy voters、entrusted investment clients and BP shareholders . Unless everyone has a high moral standard, you have no way to prevent bribery!
PART Ⅳ
Then, lets talk more about HUOBI Pool.
We can calculate it as follow table:
Date from: https://eosvoter.eosphere.io/; http://eos.dapptools.info/#/block-producers
Therefore, in fact, the daily wages that HUOBI Pool get from the EOS system, only makes up a very small ratio of value that HUOBI Pool use HPT return to its clients. There were 30 times wide gap between them. They cannot keep financial balance, even if we suppose that HUOBI Pool supports 30 nodes, and all the wages are given back to the HUOBI Pool. HUOBI Pool is a profit-making organization, so it must be making profit from other places, such as quantitative trade, rents and so on. Anyhow, from the perspective of direct economic benefits, the HUOBI Pool is not just want to obtain the BPs wages through bribery. Also, the HPT mining model developed by the HUOBI Pool is helpful to attract everyone to buy EOS, not Bitcoin, Ethereum. From the perspective of investors, it is really a good thing.
Finally, since we can’t stop such a form of bribery from technology and practically perspective, we should consider how to lead this form of voting rebate rationalization、health and morality.
PART Ⅴ
We should still consider this problem from token holders’ economical motivation.
The efforts are definitely useless if we continue to think how to use arbitration or governance to ban these behaviors. The key must be in somewhere else. If we check out the history of development of voting in Western countries, it’s from widely bribery stage to the gradual eliminated bribery stage, and eventually everyone refuses to choose bribes. This is true both in the UK and US. However, in the real world, the development of voting system from widely bribery stage to indirect bribery to the elimination of bribery, has a premise that the behavior of individuals and organizations can be observed and supervised, and the moral level of individuals and society can be continuously improved.
However, the base stone of blockchain has assumed that there is no need for trust between people (trustless). That is: no one can be required to maintain a high moral standard in the blockchain world, such as honesty, uncorrupted and so on. The main mechanism is to achieve a system balance based on game, which driven by the economy. But this is cannot be achieved overnight, it needs a longtime form balance. For example, as the profit of the HUOBI Pool continues to decrease, many holders will tend to look for new opportunities or turn to vote by themselves.
From my point of view, just like what I have talked in my article EOS, vampire、locust and mirage, we should still consider this problem from token holders’ economical motivation.
PART Ⅵ
Three key resolutions:
（A）Firstly, to extend the token locking period of BP selection, from 3 days to 6 months (or much longer).
The BPs selection do not need such high ratio of voting participation. The EOS ecosystem reference with separation of three powers. Currently, the BP election should be only one aspect of EOS voting. The main net of EOS.IO has been initiated, there is no minimum ratio requirements of votes participation. Instead, the upcoming EOS constitution voting and EOS WPS (Work proposal system), more need for ordinary token holders to participate in.
Therefore, I think the best solution is to extend the token locking period of BP selection, from 3 days to 6 months (or much longer). The reasons are as follows:
1、 In order to guarantee the liquidity of their assets, individual investors will not to choose participating in the BP selection voting or to choose proxy voting, for some relative low interest return from BP. In this way we can also increase the bribery costs.
2、 If individual investors still vote for BPs because they can have certain return income from BPs, they will be account into the shareholders of BPs. The proxy voters、Entrusted Investment clients and BP shareholders , these three identities will be integrated into one identity, the BP shareholders. This way will also eliminate any suspicions of bribery.
3、 Also, it will not have any negative impacts of those individual token holders who really care about EOS ecosystem. At the same time, the BPs can continue to attract supporters by contributing to EOS ecosystem and building their word of mouth.
（B）Secondly, the community members who participated in the voting with the WPS will be given incentives.
Individual token holders will be very willing to participate in the construction and study of the EOS ecology in the case of short-term incentives while still maintaining their liquidity of assets.
（C）Thirdly, set up an impeachment system in WPS.
When we find that through BP selection cannot delete a bad BP, we can through the community referendum which should be initiated by ECAF to impeach this BP.
PART Ⅶ
In conclusion:
- The nature attribute of the EOS token cannot separate the voting rights and property rights. This prevents us to block bribery in terms of technical and commercial practices.
2. Therefore, we should think in different way, how to lead bribery elections rational and more conducive to ecosystem of EOS.
3. Extend the token locking period of BP selection, from 3 days to 6 months (or much longer). Give incentives to the community members, lead them to participate in the voting of WPS. Set up an impeachment system in WPS. It is the best way to eliminate bribery from economic motivation.
4. When everyone finds that the cost of bribery is very high and the income from bribery is very low, there is no longer any interest-driven participation in the voting. Instead, the community members will spend more time to think, identify and choose which BP is more long-term benefit to EOS ecology.
The above is my thinking, welcome you to criticize it. Some people said my thought are too pessimistic about human beings’ morality. In my next paragraph I will talk about morality, I will prove you that talking morality in blockchain is just kind of joking, currently.
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