Proposals towards fighting back against self-voting whales on EOS
It will be tough for the community to be able to vote those self voting whale BPs out. See distribution of whale votes vs community votes below.
http://eos-bp-votes.dapptools.info/s/api/block-producer-votes-stack-html/1/40
I've posted this @daniellarimer on EOSGov on Telegram
"I still think my earlier suggestion of logscaling voting power above 1000EOS will be an effective way to prevent whales voting themselves as BP in and not putting the work and mia from ECAF meetings. This way, if a whale wishes to self-vote, then let them tediously split and try to manage thousands of accounts, each with still a substantial amount of EOS if they wise to maximize their voting power. They will of course have to then make sure to keep all those accounts active, and revote constantly to keep themselves as BP.
Adding on to my post earlier about log scaling, another suggestion I had made previously on top of this is to introduce a criteria whereby a minimum of independent voters would need to be met. Could even throw in a geographical diversity of voters requirement. Its not fool proof, but adds layers of tediousness and hopefully also cost against self voting whales.
More layers of anti-oligarchy protection could be gradually introduced, and to create a more democratically balanced ecosystem, where even those with 100 EOS tokens have some say (against the whales)."
People with higher financial stake in EOS will still get higher voting power. Whales with one million coins will have six times the voting power compared to those with one coin for a log10 scaling function. Could switch to other types of log scaling or other less harsh functions too, to find the balance btwn financial stake based voting-power and the threat of massive whales being able to control the system by virtue of the resource they have to bend it to their will.
Also if any whale is caught trying to game the system, and if they get hacked while trying to bot managed their thousands of accounts, then make it such that their funds will risk being burned with accord to the constitution.
We need to start somewhere. Implement these layers to make it difficult and requiring more effort for whales to game the system, study it, come up with more solutions, and add to and improve the existing protection gradually, inch by inch, etc. But somethings needs to be done against self-voting whales now than later.
—
Basically my suggestion was simply to force self-voting whales into risking their investments (i.e. needing to manage their funds across thousands of addresses via bots) + the effort needed to to ensure those self-votes appear sufficiently diversified different regions of the world, and so on
======
And finally, I believe a more effective solution to consider is to modify the voting mechanics by limiting renewed votes completely to only BP candidates below the top 21, which will force BPs to rotate!
i.e. when people renew their votes, they will have to consider alt BPs.. hence more BPs will have a chance of earning more to maintain their servers, plus each BPs (standby/active) can be trailed and tested by the community over time and their performances be gauged during their active phase.
It could perhaps also be made such that voters would not be able to vote for BPs that have been in the top 21 position for more than 3 mths for a period (say 3mths or even 6 mths).
Or perhaps the above could be relaxed a bit by making it compulsory for people to spend 2/3 of their votes on BPs below the top 21 instead.
===
Clarification (again): This certainly is not intended as a perfect solution, but a start towards fighting back, and increasing the risk of self-voting as the whales will then have to resort to bot manage their crazy number of split accounts to maximize their voting power, and probably with some cost too. And on top of it, other layers of discouraging self-voting by whales have been suggested, and more can be added to and built on top of it, and evolve as we go.
~ transhumanio @eos
The effort is noble, and the concept of introducing friction in order to lesson the effect is understandable, but the changes proposed as some have already noted would not gain the desired outcome.
The only way anything works to lessen this effect is to have ID Verification... no matter how many ways you slice it, every solution to this comes back to the ability of tethering ones voter balance to his identity... only then can you put parameters around how much they can vote.. the most fair in my estimation being changing voting from 1:30 to 1/30 and causing the weight of their stake to distribute instead of having full power on every vote. Yes, they could vote for themselves in that case, but they couldn't affect huge control over all active 21... and that is the real issue.
Unfortunately this is not so simple.
For a programmer this is very easy to solve. They can just create a special wallet which stores all the private keys for all accounts and vote with it like they would vote with normal wallet and one account. The wallet does all the work, no bots needed.
It's very hard to find out where people actually are. If whales want, they can easily spoof their true location.
You might want to think about this from another perspective: Are whales really so bad, and would it help if they were replaced with smaller account holders?
The answer isn't so obvious. If you reduce the power of people who have most skin in the game (they own most of the value), you might end up with voters who care less about the long term success. The more you have invested, the more you care about your investment. On average those people will make the best voting decisions who have the most to lose. Not all of them are good decisions, but most of the time the result is tolerable. It's OK because decentralized networks are really inefficient in decision making. It's not easy to improve unless there is more centralization.
Smaller token holders generally know less about the platform, how it's supposed to work, and how to make it better for long-term success. If you give these people more power, the result is probably worse than we see now when whales are in power.
The issue though is the fact that we now have top BPs who were voted in with minimum independent votes. The log scaling and regional diversification requirement of votes were just two suggestions. I believe the most effective solutions proposed here is my very last suggestion, that is to require voters to vote for a different set of BPs when they renew their votes in 3 mths to encourage BP rotation. Any BPs that have been in the top 21 position for more than 3mths could also be prevented by code to get revoted again for then next 3 mths, etc.
✅ I gave you an upvote on your post! Please give me a follow and I will give you a follow in return!