Transparency of the Impact Hour Intervention voting process

Reminder

No system is perfect.

We are at the vanguard of self governance.

We learn with every experiement and continuously improve our system designs.

What this is about

Using the json raw voting data on tokenlong (view stats), I was curious to see how quadratic voting would play out given our specific Voting Power algorithm that accounts for IHT and CSTK tokens.

I am sharing what I found because we are counting on quadratic voting as a type of mitigation against a few whales determining the outcome of a vote. It does not appear that this data backs up that assumption. That is my initial impression. There may be arguments that we want a few whales to be able to do so. That they have earned the right. I may have made a mistake in my calculations. I leave these possibilities open to the community to determime.

I anticipate that there will be people with very strong opinions about this result. And there is a real risk that discussions about this will necessitate extending the target date for the Hatch. Or worse, result in any negative sentiment. We are a kind, compassionate, respectful, introspectful and data-driven community and I hope that is enough to avoid the latter.

Here is the xls. This file does contain the unique addresses parsed from the json but for the sake of simplicity I have assigned each unique address a simple name: Voter A, B, C, etc.

Others are welcome to use this file for deeper analysis that my cursory one.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lPK8xyoRO8PdVfNKQQ_F90po8cIBZ3Xm-9txnrvkIo4/edit#gid=2083058473

Voting Power

To the best of my knowledge, this is how Voting Power has been assigned for our use of Tokenlog. I texted directly with Wesley who was generous with his time and explained it to me patiently. If I have made a mistake in my understanding, I welcome the correcion. My goal is to have a shared understanding so we can improve.

Multiplier = the ratio beteen the two token supplies.

Simply put: The % held of the IHT supply is multiplied by the multiplier and then the CSTK score is added that figure.

The examples below show an approximate amount of IHT and CSTK suppy. They are not exact but not far off. The examples were chosen to showcase different cases:

  • High IHT, low CSTK score
  • Low IHT, high CSTK score

Examples:

500 IHT (5% of 10,000 supply)
600 CSTK (0.06% of 1,000,000 supply)
Multiplier, the ratio between the two supplies, is x100.
(500x100) + 600 = 50,600 VP

100 IHT (1% of 10,000 supply)
600 CSTK (0.06% of 1,000,000 supply)
Multiplier, the ratio between the two supplies, is x100.
(100x100) + 600 = 10,600 VP

50 IHT (0.5% of 10,000 supply)
600 CSTK (0.06% of 1,000,000 supply)
Multiplier, the ratio between the two supplies, is x100.
(50x100) + 600 = 5,600 VP

500 IHT (5% of 10,000 supply)
20,000 CSTK (2% of 1,000,000 supply)
Multiplier is still x 100
(500x100) + 20,000 = 70,000 VP

100 IHT (1% of 10,000 supply)
20,000 CSTK (2% of 1,000,000 supply)
Multiplier is still x 100
(100x100) + 20,000 = 30,000 VP

50 IHT (0.5% of 10,000 supply)
20,000 CSTK (2% of 1,000,000 supply)
Multiplier is still x 100
(50x100) + 20,000 = 25,000 VP

The end of the first round of voting

Updated the xls with the final results of the first round of votes. The runoff votes are now happening, go here and vote! The vote ends Tuesday, July 6, at 8pm CET.

Of interest to me here is that:

  • If not for the 24 hour extension of the vote (noted by the black line between voter DD and EE), the decision would have been made by, essentially, 4 of the 30 voters.
  • The additional 7 voters in that 24 hour period applied 71% of their quadratic votes (723 of 1023) to proposal 2, which swung the vote in that direction.
  • What lessons are there to be learned here for the upcoming runoff vote and for voting process design in general?

Griff added a tab to show a recombintion of the percentage of voting power applied.

So if:

  • Voter B applied 60% of her voting power to proposal 3 and
  • Voter H applied 40% of her voting power to proposal 3

Then:

  • Proposal 3 would have a combined 100% a voter-unit.

This is super interesting! It's not exactly 1-person, 1-vote but it does ingeniously try to simulate that idea. Maybe it's more like 1-recombined-person, 1-vote.

Here is what those results look like:

Voting power breakdown

The data we have here is empirical. It accurately shows what actually did happen based on our employedment of quadratic voting.

The data shows how many unique addresses participated, how much voting power they used and where they applied that voting power. That's all.

Here is what stood out about the results to me:

  • Before an emergency 24 hour extension was granted:
    • The top 4 out of 30 voters (13%) accounted for 50% of the entire voting power used.
  • After the 24 hour extension:
    • The top 5 out of 37 voters (14%) accounted for 50% of the entire voting power used.
  • Are these the results we expected?
  • Is this what we want?

Before the 24 hour extension:

After the 24 hour extension:

Choosing the runoff proposals

In the end, the final runoff proposals were determined based on Griff's calculations of applied voting power. That is the simulation of one-person one-vote in one of the xls tabs.

Using that method there is only one change in rank: Jeff's praisemageddon comes in second, ahead of Sem's no-intervention. The rest appear to be ranked the same order as the quadratic voting results.

Count votes not voting power

Griff made a comment in this very long forum post, Pre-Hatch Impact Hours Distribution Analysis about counting votes not voting power.

That makes sense. So we should look at that too.

Thank you for asking this, @Griff

“Is voting power relevant?” is a good question to challenge our most basic assumptions. My understanding is the correlation with votes-that-can-be-cast makes it relevant in this discussion but agree we should also look at the actual votes cast.

I come to a diff result for the first part (see below) but the same for the second.

I believe the following is true. Is there a mistake I don’t see? Based on the tokenlog data of the primary voting period:

  • it would require 10 of 37 voters, 27% of voters, alone to determine the winner.
  • If all other 27 voters combined, 73% of voters, voted for a single but different option, they would not have enough votes to pass it.
  • Before the 24h extension: 8 out of 30 voters (27%) cast 50% of the total votes.
  • After the 24h extension: 10 out of 37 voters (27%) cast 50% of the total votes.

And here is what that looks like visually:

The final vote (in progress)

9 AM CET
This is still happening (vote ends tonight) but here is what we see so far.

Link to the xls.

There are 48 unique addresses that particiapted in this final vote so far.


7:30 PM CET (Not closed yet)

There are 54 unique addresses.

  • 6 of the 54 voters (11%) applied over 50% of voting power
  • 12 of 54 voters (22%) cast over 50% of the votes.

Final vote

  • There were 54 voters.
  • 7 of the 54 voters (13%) applied over 50% of voting power
  • 12 of 54 voters (22%) cast over 50% of the votes.

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