We’re Voting for Athens A
With the first Tezos protocol amendment upon us, we are more than excited to see Tezos governance in action in the real world. Ever since we read Arthur Breitman’s whitepaper in 2016, we knew that on-chain governance had the opportunity to forge a new partnership between cryptocurrency users and ecosystem operators. We are now seeing that in action.
With Athens A and Athens B, the developers at Nomadic have given us two reasonable choices to move our chain forward. Both propose to increase gas limits, and Athens A also proposes to reduce roll size requirements from 10,000 xtz to 8,000 xtz.
In our opinion, both of these proposals are non-controversial and neither poses meaningful technical risk. While some make arguments that reduction in roll size could lead less technical community members to start baking, and that could lead to more risk and fewer zero priority blocks, we believe these risks are “on the margin” — present but not relevant to the overall success of our project.
While Tezos Capital is now a large delegation service, representing over 1400 different stakeholders, we came from the community. We started as an information and social sharing site (tezos.community and @tezoscommunity on twitter) and we plan to continue to live up to that origination story. We believe that reducing roll requirements is an exciting egalitarian move by the xtz coin-holder community — showing that we have a big tent that is open to participation by all who wish to join us. We should not have financial barriers stand in the way of baking participation, and we believe that tooling will emerge that will deliver baking capabilities for the most modest levels of investment. Our roll requirements should support that.
While we know that some bakers, including us, continue to be quite large participants in the ecosystem, we think it is also vitally important that we lower the barriers to entry so that anyone with the desire and a modicum of know-how can join our commonwealth.
A self amending protocol — driven by broad community support is a huge enhancement to the crypto ecosystem. We are voting for Athens A — to reduce roll size requirements and increase gas limits — in order to support the biggest, most vibrant community we can develop. Let’s make history!
