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The Evolution of EOS Governance

Why the EUA Must Be Amended to Restore Referendum

In a previous article, EOS Governance — A Way Forward, I proposed adding Referendum to the EUA as a means of leaving the door open for Community Self Governance to manifest at some future time. That point is now moot, the EUA is the supreme law of the chain on EOS, and it does not seem likely that Block Producers will vote to restore Referendum.

This means any manifestation of Community Self Governance in the future is now up to the BPs and whales to decide, and they of course have significant disincentive to promote CSG as it would obviously diminish their power and control. This is not a good position to be in. This is structural weakness, an achilles heel.

People signed on to EOS not just because it was to be a fast and scalable DPOS chain, but in some large part because Dan promised decentralized governance where the vote of individual token holders would matter. That was lost with Referendum when the EUA was installed.

Dan’s vision was worth fighting for because we knew in our bones that he had it right on Community Self Governance, that he was seeing the future. So what follows is my attempt to explain why we bought in, and why we must never give up the quest for free market solutions to secure our lives, liberty, and property.

Like many of you, I’d never heard this odd term before, but it turns out to be one of the reasons Dan was right. I was scanning through Telegram a few months ago and there it was. Thomas Cox was being pressed to admit the 15% participation requirement was wrongheaded, and when asked, What do we do now? replied…

This of course sounded exactly like what Talkchain brings to the table, so I dug in a bit. In the article below, constitutional catallaxy is described as constitutional entrepreneurialism in which participants are continually developing the rules of the game even after the game has started.

Mises and Hayek defined catallaxy as a network of competing individuals, each serving distinct goals and aspirations, coming together with a focus on exchanging (conversation, discussion, debate) rather than deciding. It’s about peaceful cooperation where enemies can actually become friends. In other words, conflict resolution in a free marketplace of ideas brought forth by individuals. In Talkchain we call this collective conversation.

So to my delight I discovered Talkchain appears to be innately catallactic, and therefore the perfect platform on which to follow Thomas’ advice. The problem was, Talkchain was not quite ready and the clock was ticking on the EUA proposal.

Catallaxy goes hand in hand with direct democracy, where the idea is that everyone (i.e., individual token holders) votes on everything that interests them, and there are no representatives. Catallaxy is ideally also flat and decentralized, with no intervening hierarchy of gatekeepers, just like direct democracy, basically collective decision by referendum.

Representative democracy is where the people vote for representatives, who then vote on their behalf on specific issues. This brief video summarizes the differences with direct democracy nicely.

What I wanted to propose and make real with EOS Talkchain was the realization of Dan’s vision for CSG, in particular, immediate public referendum.

Jean-Jaques Rousseau, intellectual contemporary of Thomas Jefferson and some say father of the French Revolution, was a champion of direct democracy.

Rousseau believed in popular sovereignty, the idea that power ultimately resides in the people. This is not radical at all today, but in Rousseau’s time most states were ruled by monarchs. The political role of the people was limited, and even then the people tended to mean a wealthy, property-owning elite.

Is this not the situation we face today in the EOS Community? The BPs are the monarchs/representatives and token holders are in actuality a wealthy elite, the whales. And once again, direct democracy is the solution.

Direct democracy is why Dan was right to advocate Community Self Governance, and why we need to restore Referendum to the heart of our EOS User Agreement.

But there is another reason for doing so that is even more powerful…

Community Self Governance is essentially catallactic direct democracy, with all the goodness that promises, but it’s actually much more… If the requirements of a wise crowd are met by our EOS Community, and that appears to be the case, we could eventually begin to ascend to an entirely new plane, one characterized by measurable collective intelligence.

James Surowiecki explains how it works in his 2005 book.

The EOS Community is obviously a wise crowd, of that there can be no doubt. It is diverse, independent, and decentralized. The aggregation condition is performed by Referendum, leading to the emergence of collective intelligence in the form of a consensus that peaks when all facts are factored and all voices heard.

So is there a way for us to actually achieve this for the EOS Community?

Participation requirements don’t make sense for staked voting, our Community has now proven that. Whales completely ruin the emergence of collective intelligence. If I’m a whale with one million EOS it is no different than if I controlled a massive voting block of individuals. It means independence, diversity of opinion, and decentralization are out the window.

Ultimately, it may be the case that only 1P1V Referendum will serve our purpose optimally, and if that is the case it should be enshrined in the EUA/Constitution along with functional participation requirements for Community consensus.

Referendum is the instrument of expression for the collective identity that is the Community, whether EOS or Telos. That said, 1P1V is the only option for EOS, unless EOS were to follow Telos’ example by severely limiting whale voting power, but currently both of those are problematic. 1P1V is not yet possible on EOS, although this will probably be remedied in the next few months with the emergence of Voice. Even then, it will take time for the solution to be widely disseminated and adopted. Until then, 1A1V Referendum will serve us well enough! And Telos Talkchain will allow us to compare 1A1V results with their limited staked voting results.

Yes, Sybil attacks are a vulnerability with 1A1V, so we intend to thoroughly discuss and debate how best to mitigate them. Perhaps by correlating account creation times with voting patterns — if a set of accounts created within a certain window consistently voted similarly, those accounts could be attacking the network. 1A1V metrics could also come with a margin of error disclaimer, as do all modern polls. Finally, if would-be attackers know that 1P1V is coming soon, will they not be exposing their criminal activity by attempting to exploit its preliminary 1A1V implementation? All those fake accounts will suddenly fall away like dead leaves with the appearance of 1P1V. In sum, Sybil attacks are a consideration, but certainly not a show stopper.

Given all this, how do we make Community Self Governance real for EOS?

The EUA has now replaced the Interim Constitution, but is the EUA a viable constitution itself? And if it isn’t, how can it be considered legitimate? What are Dan’s thoughts on the subject of an EOS constitution? What were we all led to expect?

Given these definitions, the EUA is not really a constitution. Instead, it’s more of a disclaimer designed to limit liability while describing BPs as central to any and all legitimate governance on chain. In terms of rights, the EUA seems only to deny the Community its fundamental right of Referendum by recasting the existing Referendum as a measurement device for Community sentiment, which may then be factored into final decisions at BP discretion.

So what did Dan think back in the day? The following three articles from 2–3 years ago comprise the bulk of his original vision for governance on EOS. I read them last year with more than a little excitement, the possibilities were positively inspirational.

This last article contains an Example Constitution, please do take a look. That’s Dan from 2 years ago. So from there he went to the Interim Constitution, then on to EOS Constitution V2, which was truly minimal but retained Referendum as a means of direct community governance, and then to the EUA, which he apparently supported despite its relegation of Referendum to an ancillary role at best.

To be clear, I am not recommending adopting Dan’s Example Constitution. My approach would have been a minimal seed constitution, perhaps one based on the EUA and/or Dan’s V2, that also empowers us to modify and build upon it as needed, that is the key. It is the ability to evolve by our own collective will that is required, expressed via referendum, and that has been lost for now.

Here are some of the things the EUA needed to address.

An established Consensus Threshold would serve as the community’s public agreement with itself that it will only consider a Referendum-based collective decision valid if it conforms to a minimum set of requirements.

Again, the only way a voter participation threshold makes sense is in a 1P1V/1A1V voting system, so there must be a minimum percentage of individual token holders required for Referendum. This is what will bring minnows (the people) into the Community, as their vote will now actually matter.

The Constitution must establish a standard for BPs as operators and maintainers of the network… They can be deciders if authorized by the Community via Referendum, but they should not be the ultimate deciders. It would be fully expected, however, that BPs serve as expert advisors to the Community and participate heavily during the decision making process.

We must proclaim in our foundational document our aspiration to achieve maximum decentralization. We need to realize that Dan was right for a reason — catallaxy, direct democracy, and the wisdom of crowds produce collective intelligence, while plutocracy ultimately produces unintelligence. We needed our constitution to showcase our intentions and beliefs and facilitate our growth toward them.

It may be possible to transform the EUA into a true constitution by adding something like the following articles. Of course the BPs would have to decide to modify the EUA and that may seem unlikely, but if we demonstrate a powerful enough consensus for it they may have to relent. In the worst case, we’ll just have to vote in BPs who will agree to amend.

Please examine these proposed articles and think how easy it would be to add them to the EUA and restore our commitment to Dan’s vision of CSG.

As the community supporting and evolving EOS, the potential foundation of our next generation Internet, our mission must be to maximize our collective intelligence. We value decentralization and community self governance as guiding principles, and see plutocracy as a brief though necessary phase of our developmental process as a born DPOS blockchain. We therefore aspire to a more intelligent form of consensus generation, a catallactic direct democracy based on 1P1V Referendum, to which every individual EOS token holder has a right of participation.

The requirements for a passed referendum shall be no less than TBD% voter participation among individual token holders, and no fewer than TBD% more Yes votes than No votes, or an aggregate approval rating of no less than TBD%.

We choose to adopt 1P1V as the voting model for our Referendum system. Until 1P1V is widely available, we recognize that 1A1V must suffice.

This constitution may be amended and/or modified by Referendum.

Producers shall implement without delay all passed Referenda. Failure to do so will result in immediate disqualification, as shall any attempt to implement a modification that has not been authorized by Referendum.

If we want the EOS Community to become collectively intelligent the importance of the individual token holder is paramount. 1A1V is the closest we can get right now to 1P1V, which will make possible a fully digital direct democracy. Until now in human history direct democracy has been extremely difficult to scale and secure. These problems will soon be solved, and the future is indeed bright so long as we don’t sabotage ourselves by falling into old patterns before fully understanding the opportunities before us.

BPs argued correctly that staked referendum was meaningless, but that shouldn’t have meant Referendum was sacrificed, it should have meant stake-weighted voting was sacrificed. Pure DPOS is good for getting a chain started, but then the chain has to evolve, on its own, consciously, and Referendum is essential for that to happen.

In a future system whales will choose to cede their power entirely to the demonstrably more intelligent Community. They will do this because the data will prove it’s the smartest thing they can do. Until that time, a time when the real Community, not the whales, will choose even the BPs, 1A1V/1P1V will allow the Community to form a check on whales, to balance their power.

I believe our collective vision should be an engaged EOS Community leading the world into a collectively intelligent future of individual liberty and justice for all. This kind of conscious evolution really is possible, and it’s entirely up to us. Amending some version of the Community Articles above to the EUA would be a way to make it real.

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