Our Stance on Blockchain Governance and re The First Tezos Voting

Fellow Delegators,

As a top-ten-baker in Tezos and would-be validator in Cosmos, we take our active participation in blockchain governance not just rights granted, but a critical obligation.

Governance is a critical and controversial topic in cryptoland, block-size debate and DAO hard fork, for examples, all highly political, polarizing and toxic.

We’ve participated in the DAO and been through the hell-like debacles that ultimately led to ETH fork, frustrated and bitter times

Crypto and blockchain are still experimental, on-chain/off-chain governance debates are very thorny and intensely political. Most of the governance experiments upto date are via off-chain/social coordination, Tezos are the few public blockchain projects that advocate on-chain governance and on the very frontier experimenting the novel model, we at Blockpower, are very proud to be part of this experiment.

It is important that we lay out our consideration and rationale clear and loud when times come (like this) to respective governance decision.

Below we summarize the key value drivers (blockchain agnostic) for our decision making regarding general blockchain governance issues (not limited to Tezos):

1. Technology-oriented Pragmatism. Crypto is still nascent and plenty of room for trials and errors and we like to support experimental technology, novel model, bold move to challenge the incumbents. Ethereum was experimental and untested when we participated in its ICO back in 2014, later in DAO in 2016 and subsequently in Tezos, Cosmos, Filecoin, BAT, Decentraland, dForce etc. So for any fork/upgrade which generally improves its underlying technology or provide new models /technological possibility, will have our unwavering vote of confidence and support.
2. Decentralization and broader community engagement. We believe this is the core value pro for blockchain, however, when it’s intertwined with other trade-offs, i.e efficiency or security, we will have to weight those factors into the final decision.
3. Censorship Resistance and privacy. Censorship resistance is core to fungibility which is the layer 0 value pro that shouldn’t be compromised or traded off.
4. Monetary Policy. Monetary policy is the mean that serves as ingredients to nurture and grow the network value of the ecosystem. We generally support a fair monetary policy that engineered around premise of sharing value across all stakeholders. However, the policy should be driven by the design goal of specific blockchain at a particular time, there isn’t an one-size-fit-all solution and should be determined on a case by case basis.

Now, let’s turn to Tezos’ upcoming voting which is related to two competing proposals (mainly related to Value 1 and 2 above), outlined here: https://blog.nomadic-labs.com/athens-proposals-injected.html and here https://blog.nomadic-labs.com/athens-our-proposals-for-the-first-voted-amendment.html

In summary:

Proposal A: Gas limit change and the one that includes the change in roll size from 10,000 to 8,000 tez

Proposal B: Gas limit change without the roll size change, i.e simply does not include the change to roll size.

There is quite an intensive debate regarding the two proposals. We personally are in favor of Proposal B, mainly because:

1）The current minimum roll-size of 10K xtz is already quite low comparing across other PoS systems, evidenced by hundred of bakers participation and high staking ratio, marginal reduction of 2k (or $800 at current market price) will not lower the barrier much;

2）The cost of implementing/bakers’ accommodation/ increased overhead cost/reward reconfiguration is non-negligible and the risk and burden doesn’t justify the pursue;

3） Yes, it’s about aesthetics, rounded number just has better rhythm.

However, this is not our final decision. We would like to hear your voice and put up a poll on Twitter to pick up your signals, all these will ultimately be weighted into our final decision. So, if you have a strong opinion regarding the issue, please signal your preference on our Twitter Poll, Reddit or Telegram, we will listen.

Baking Never Sleeps!