Home Blockchain Charles Hoskinson on Cardano (ADA) Explicitly Inviting For Governance Voting

Charles Hoskinson on Cardano (ADA) Explicitly Inviting For Governance Voting

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Lex Fridman:  So, you did say, the success of Cardano, the division you have, is for you to have less and less power over time. So, this idea of governance was your vision for decentralized and pure governance system.

The first thing you have to do is you got to look at meaningful metrics, not vanity metrics. So, what does it mean to have legitimacy in a Governance System?  It could be any governance system you want. If you have a dictator right – Bob was in charge, whether you like Bob or not, you know. He is in charge. He is not very legitimate.

In a peer democracy, where everything that the person votes, nothing ever gets done. So, there is a spectrum there between absolute power to one and perfectly Egalitarian power to every single potential participant inside the system.

And then the question is okay. Well how do you have a choice of the architecture?  Are you asking your people about every question or you are asking your people about a subset of questions related to a particular set of topics, but they are not allowed to talk about other topics?

For example are they ready to change the tax rate, but they can’t change freedom of speech, that kind of a thing.  So, the first thing you have to do when you build these types of systems and they get to a certain scale is you have to build some mechanism for people who are interested in the governance to self-select and participate.

In Bitcoin we had Bitcoin Talk, Bitcoin Reddit and these things and eventually they get a place to go if you are interested.

You need some sort of change in management system. Where people who want to evolve the system can write it down in a very careful way. So, in Bitcoin’s case it is Bitcoin Improvement Proposal.  If it is Ethereum, it is the Ethereum Improvement proposal and for us it is the CIP, the Cardano Improvement proposal, but this is just a structured way of discussing how you wish to change.

Then, there is a question of do you want to do it implicitly or explicitly.  In the case of Bitcoin and Ethereum, it is an implicit system.  So there is no on chain voting. There is no like 5 people said this and 4 people said this and we do this.

In the case of Cardano, we are actually explicitly inviting.  This is one of the biggest differentiators between Cardano, Polkadot, and EOS.  We are really serious about governance to the extent that we are actually doing foundational research in e-voting.  We are building new voting systems, we are exploring preferential voting, quadratic voting. We want more and more people do participate in voting for things and you have to start somewhere and so our hypothesis is we can bootstrap the system with the treasury system in Cardano. 

So, in Cardano some of the inflation goes to the block producers just any other cryptocurrency.  Some goes in to a decentralized treasury has a more then billion dollars of ADA and it is a lot of money.  And, that treasury is not under my control or the foundation’s control.  It is actually controlled by the community as a whole through a program called Catalyst. And so all these people can come together and they can submit spending ballots and other people who hold ADA can vote to approve that.

What is nice thing is absolute participation. So, increase the amount of people whole hold ADA participating.  So, the absolute number of people participating.  And, the other is meaningful participation. So, the depth of participation.  Did you just show up and vote or did you spend hours debating things on ideas, scale, innovation measure in the platform, interacting with the funding proposal going back and forth and there is dozens of little things like that.

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Steven Anderson

Steven is an explorer by heart – both in the physical and the digital realm. A traveler, Steven continues to visit new places throughout the year in the physical world, while in the digital realm has been instrumental in a number of Kickstarter projects. Technology attracts Steven and through his business acumen has gained financial profits as well as fame in his business niche. Send a tip to: 0x200294f120Cd883DE8f565a5D0C9a1EE4FB1b4E9

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