Jur Voting System 101 — Part II

The most basic explanation of the Jur voting system is: voters who correctly predict what the majority believes is fair earn the tokens that are forfeited by voters who select the side that receives fewer votes in the form of committed tokens. If you are not already familiar with Jur voting, you can learn more about the basic concept of the Jur voting system here first. Now let’s look at some of the details.

Clear Contract KPIs For Objective Judgment

The Jur system is only as good as the contract you put in it. If a contract has clear performance indicators that are objectively measurable, it will be easy to resolve a dispute fairly. If the contract requires subjective information, the judgment of the Oracles must be subjective. Even so, the result will be the subjectively chosen proposal that receives the strongest support. To the extent that a subjective question can be answered fairly, it will. For instance, a contract may require 1,000-word articles that a particular specified tool will verify are error free and written at the college reading level. These are clear KPIs. If the buyer and the seller choose to include the requirement that the articles be “interesting” they will be calling on the subjective judgment of the Oracles. The Oracles will still attempt to render that subjective judgment fairly, or choose to abstain if they are not confident that they are able to do so.

This reveals a characteristic of Jur that differs from traditional arbitration. Where KPIs are clear, Jur will function much like an arbiter, but with the virtue of the reliability of the wisdom of the crowd in preventing any possible bias or corruption. When KPIs are not clear, as a decentralized and autonomous entity, Jur will create its own crowd-based subjective concept of fairness rather than relying on the subjective opinion of a single person or a few people. What, after all, is truly “fair”? Something that seems correct to a handful of people? Or something that a broad population agrees is fair?

Defining A Clear Majority

The minimum margin required to establish an official majority is 0.1 JUR tokens. For the purpose of counting rewards, if the minority proposition receives 100 voted tokens, the first 100.1 tokens voted on the majority side are rewarded. If no majority is established at the end of the voting period, the vote is extended for 30 minute periods until a majority is established. In the future, we may add some more advanced features regarding how we end voting and define a clear majority based on testing and suggestions from our community.

Standard Vs Custom Judgment Period

The standard judgment period is 24 hours. As Jur expands with the “Community” (formerly called“Hub”) system to serve more complex cases, Jur will add a feature to allow users to select longer judgment periods for more complex contracts.

Last-Minute Voting Extension

With a fixed end to voting, an unscrupulous actor with a large number of tokens could vote enough on the minority side to overturn the consensus at the last moment of voting, denying the community a chance to respond. To render this type of attempt at corruption impossible, the Jur voting period is automatically extended by 30 minutes if new votes amounting to 5% or more of the total votes arrive in the final 30 minute period. The potential for an extension also applies to the 30-minute voting extension period; if the vote total increases by another 5% or more during a 30-minute extension. This logic gets applied recursively until valid conditions are met to close the voting process.

Why Votes Are Visible

The prospect of earning reward tokens for correctly and early enough to establish the majority motivates Oracles to do the work of analyzing disputes. The vote counts are visible to provide clear information about the incentives currently available.

Maximum Vote

If there were no limit on votes, a single voter could create an immense lead for one proposition, discouraging any single voter unable to overcome that lead from risking a vote. Consequently, no one will be allowed to vote for a proposition once it has a 100% lead until additional votes are cast for the competing proposition. For instance, if Bob and Alice are tied at 100 and someone votes 100 more tokens for Bob, no one will be allowed to vote additional tokens for Bob until additional tokens are voted for Alice. This ensures that voters who perceive that the fairest proposal is losing will always have a reasonable hope that the consensus will be overturned.

Possible Future Token Locking To Ensure Corruption Attack Price Impacts Are Felt By Perpetrators

Jur has considered adding a token locking feature that would delay distribution of refunded tokens and reward tokens for some set period of time after the vote. This feature would ensure perpetrators of corruption attacks would suffer the reduction in value of JUR tokens resulting from a successful attack on the vote resulting in a corrupt decision on a high-volume vote. We are not including this feature in the MVP because we believe other factors are sufficient to protect Jur from corruption attacks, but if it is necessary, we can implement it easily.

Jur Can’t Be Corrupted By Rational Whale Attacks

What would happen if someone with a very large number of Jur wanted to vote selfishly for an unfair position to gain tokens? Fortunately, the maximum vote feature guarantees that would-be whale attackers face a formidable risk of losing all the tokens they commit that renders whale attack attempts risky, irrational, and unlikely to succeed.

Consider an example: a potential whale attacker has 1 M JUR tokens and is considering an attempt to corrupt a vote. The attacker knows that Alice, who currently has 200 tokens voted for her has made the fairest proposal. The whale considers voting for Bob, who only has 100 tokens voted for him. If the whale could commit his 1 M tokens, they could create a substantial wall, making smaller token holder votes for Alice quite risky. But the maximum vote rule limits the whale to voting 300 for Bob at the moment the vote is 200 to 100 because no one can commit more tokens to a proposition that has a 100% lead.

In this case, the wall is not insurmountable, so fair voters may commit tokens to Alice and the whale’s tokens will be at risk. The whale can continue to commit more tokens, but the active voting community can alert other JUR holders (including other whales) of the opportunity to earn the corrupt whale’s tokens, creating a significant risk of losing for the whale, and hence a powerful disincentive for corruption attack attempts.

Voting on Small Sums

In the case of disputes involving small amounts of money, the community will develop an understanding of the minimum amount of money required to attract voters. The person who opens the dispute will stake an adequate amount of JUR to attract the attention of voters. Note that as long as they win, they will get all this money back. Only if someone opens a dispute and offers an unfair proposal that loses will they forfeit their opening stake of voted tokens.

Special Case — The Reject Vote

Oracles have three basic options when considering a dispute on Jur — abstain from voting, choose the resolution proposed by the party opening the dispute or choose the proposal of the counterparty. Jur offers another special type of vote for unusual cases. Because Jur is decentralized, there is nothing to prevent users from loading contracts that violate laws, ethics, or fundamental rights of the parties. To address this issue, Jur provides the option for Oracles to vote to “reject” a dispute on the grounds that it is unethical or even illegal and hence inappropriate for Jur. In the case that more tokens are committed to the reject vote than to either proposal, the escrow funds are simply returned to the parties. The voters who selected “Reject” in time to establish the plurality are rewarded. For more details, see our whitepaper.

Game Theory Proofs

The Schelling point theory forms the core of Jur’s game theory. This theory says that there is a definable, predictable solution to a problem, a focal point that the most people will gravitate to when asked to solve the problem, an answer that seems special or relevant to them. When we ask, which of these two proposals is the fairest, the Schelling point answer is the proposal that society views as fairest. We have gone a step past Schelling point theory to demonstrate that Jur will yield fair outcomes.

The rational actor wants to maximize their chance of winning tokens and minimize their chance of losing tokens. Choosing fairly is the only strategy that will accomplish this goal. Our mathematical models show all the possible behaviors for a voter and their expected outcomes. From these models, we can safely conclude that rational actors will always attempt to select the fairest outcome in good faith or choose to abstain if they cannot confidently do so.

Jur Advantages Over Other Systems

There are other systems that offer alternatives to conventional dispute resolution, and some also use the blockchain. But Jur is the first decentralized oracle for dispute resolution. Other systems use small jury pools selected by centralized authorities, sometimes with a random element. Such pools are much easier to corrupt by bribery. With a huge universe of voters, Jur if functionally impervious to bribery attempts. Jur can be applied to any use case that involves two competing propositions because it has a wide community of voters that can opt in to any vote for which they feel they can confidently predict the outcome. At first glance, Jur might seem less suitable for complex cases requiring specialized experts. And indeed, in its early version, Jur will not be a great option for cases that require expert knowledge. But as the Jur community grows, we will introduce a new concept: user-created Communities where the admins can require special expertise to participate in the vote. For more information, see our whitepaper.

Testing the Voting System — Objective and Subjective Cases

The Jur team will invite members of the Jur Alliance to participate in tests with actual tokens. We expect Alliance members will be ethical supporters of Jur, but for the tests, Alliance members will be invited to consider unethical strategies. We will begin by testing cases with clear objective KPIs providing real tokens for Alliance members to vote on fictitious cases. We will also test cases with contracts and disputes that require more subjective assessments.

Learning by the Community

Over time, voters, contract users, and contract template authors will learn by experimentation and studying the work of others. In the beginning, Jur will have fewer voters many of whom may be well-informed experts in dispute resolution. In the medium term, Jur may attract substantial numbers of “weak voters” — voters that are unable to correctly assess fairness and unable to recognize their own limitations. Such voters will either learn to improve their choices or learn to abstain. Contract users may neglect to include important details or clear KPIs, yielding unpredictable results and uncertainty. The users and the community will observe these failures and provide better solutions and guidance.

The Power of the Jur Community

Jur is a decentralized project, powered by the community The community will render fair judgment in the voting process. Members of the community will also design contract templates. Community members can also create closed “Communities” where they can establish specific guidelines for ruling on disputes and create requirements that limit who can vote in the closed Community, allowing Jur to offer reliable dispute resolution for more complex and specialized cases. For instance, a closed Community for engineering services contracts might only allow people with engineering credentials and experience testifying as expert witnesses in government-run courts.

Future Additions to the Jur Protocol

We have a number of possible additions and improvements to the Jur protocol that we may implement after testing the basic version in order to expand possible use cases for Jur and make the protocol more impervious to corruption. We will be discussing them in the coming months and presenting a more detailed roadmap for the roll-out of new features. These are just the core principles of our voting system. We welcome questions and comments. We invite all interested parties to consider joining the Jur Alliance, a community of experts that will help guide the development and expansion of Jur and help reshape how business agreements are established and enforced.

Join The Jur Oracle Community

You can read more about becoming an Oracle and voting here, and read more about the basics of the voting system here and a broader overview of Jur here. If you are interested in helping guide the development of Jur and encouraging people to use it, you can read more about the Jur Alliance and see our draft Manifesto here.

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