I think it’s an oversimplification to suggest that providing an incentive to vote would result in poor decision making in aggregate. While some voters may respond to the incentive by voting casually without fully considering the options, or even go so far as automating their votes to ensure they are eligible to the reward without considering the options at all, its not clear that this would be the dominant strategy.
My expectation is that a portion of ANT holders would respond to an incentive to vote by actively engaging in the governance processes. With delegation on the horizon many may choose to simply engage enough to find someone who they feel aligned with and delegate their vote. In either case we would expect to see increased discussions on issues in the forum and other channels, and a much broader and diverse population of participants in the process. Individually they may not be as qualified to make “good decisions” as a small handful of highly engaged experts, but it doesn’t seem obvious to me that as whole decisions quality would be made worse as a result.
I’m not opposed to experimenting with this in another organization, but would like to clarify how you are quantifying the risk? Lock voting, which you presented as a potential change to the AGP process is also a significant change the incentive structure of voting, is it prudent to also experiment with that somewhere else first? If not, why not?
This seems like it adds a lot of complexity and at a surface level I’m not sure how it would impact the incentives of “complete mercenaries” as the expected value of a lottery should essentially equivalent the expected value of a straightforward reward.
The proposal isn’t to create an ongoing policy that would renew after a year, but specifically to allocate up to 1$ million in rewards over the next 12 months. The policy could and likely should be amended or changed in subsequent ANVs.
The reason I choose 1Million as a place to start the discussion (besides it being a nice round number) is because ANT’s market cap is currently 24M and so 1Million dollars in rewards over the course of a year would be approximately 4%. If we compare this reward mechanism to PoS or DPOS reward mechanism, which are probably the closest analogue, 4% doesn’t seem particularly high or super low.
I’m trying to avoid going into locking discussions in this thread, but I see how it makes sense to talk about both proposals together if locking is being proposed as a solution to minimize negligent/random voting.
My main concern with introducing a locking requirement for participation is that it would increase the cost to participate and exclude users from participating because of how their ANT is being stored–Specifically I’m trying to avoid locking because I think that with Aragon Fundraising, organizations will have ANT held in a bonding curve reserve pool and will not be able to move their ANT into a locking contract. If we implement locking (and locking requires moving ANT into a lock contract) it would be impossible for ANT that is in the bonding curve reserve contract to be used to vote. If Aragon Fundraising is successful, and the organizations that launch on the platform are successful, this could end up locking a significant amount of ANT in these bonding curve reserve contracts.
For a bit of background, right now the default template for org creation would have both a DAI and ANT bonding curve, and the reserve ratio (aka connector weight) for ANT would be 0.01 (some additional context on this would work is here). An organization using this configuration that has a market cap of 1Million, would be holding $10k worth of ANT in their bonding curve reserve. If our goal is for the AGP process to be representative of the community and users of Aragon, figuring out how to make the AGP process work without excluding these users should be a prominent design goal…
If we can figure out a way to do locking that doesn’t exclude organizations that have ANT locked in a bonding curve from participating I think that locking because a much more interesting avenue to explore. One possibility would be to implement the locking functionality in ANT token controller contract, though this might require a token migration.
I’m not sure how complex it would end up being but Instead of locking, we could consider a Vested Rewards structure. Where the rewards you receive for voting are not immediately accessible but instead vested over time (perhaps 4 years with a one year cliff), and revoked or reduced if your balance of ANT decreases during the vesting period. This would provide a similar long-term incentive to hold ANT and be subject to results of votes, but without a strict locking mechanism.
