RPIP-4 discussion: who should vote?

I ran some numbers during some down time and want to provide a quick update for everyone that likes seeing the data.

Voting Power

Last week, we had 50 voters with 977.91 combined voting power that wouldn’t be able to participate under the >10% only rule. Today that is now 74 voters with 1436.41 combined voting power. This is just about 20% of quorum using the “All nodes eligible” strategy.

Related, only 13 voters that voted in the RocketSplit poll also voted in the new polls but are currently under 10%. That’s up slightly from 10 last time, but does lend evidence to the notion I heard in Discord that people tend to “check out” if the vote is very one-sided (or they just don’t find the proposal interesting enough to state a position perhaps).

Delegates

The majority of the large delegates have the same number of constituents today as they did last week, though for each of them, the number of constituents that are now below 10% has increased due to the latest ratio movement.

My script checks for voting overrides by determining if any of a delegate’s constituents explicitly voted for a different choice than their delegate. At this time, all of the large delegates (outside of myself) have changed their vote to “All nodes eligible”. As a result, I don’t see any overrides which means all of the overrides also voted for “All nodes eligible” prior to the delegates changing their votes.

Legitimacy

Last week, 2 voters voted in the “10% only” poll but not the “All nodes eligible” poll. Today that has increased to 3. Their combined voting power is only 85 right now so it’s not particularly impactful. Some people suggested they may simply be confused which seems plausible.

There remains only a single voter that voted differently between the polls with a voting power of 17, so I am discarding it. For all intents and purposes the legitimacy of the voting hasn’t been polluted.

Feedback

I initially asked for some more feedback from people who voted for the “>10% only” option so I could better understand the position in order to make my decision. I did receive some of it, both in here and in the Discord server, which was helpful to me. One of the more surprising things was that several people voted for “>10% only” because they thought it was the status quo; it was their understanding that this was how it was done throughout all of Redstone and we were simply voting to give them an ability they didn’t already have due to ratio movement.

I want to highlight this and make it very clear: the “>10% only” option is not the status quo. For all of Redstone, which is largely when the pDAO kind of materialized, all nodes were eligible to vote on everything. Regardless of whether or not the contracts followed the original design intent, this is a hard truth. This vote isn’t about granting people power they didn’t originally have; in “fixing the bug” during Atlas, voters lost power they did originally have. There is a difference between the two and despite several prominent voices asking people to ignore the past and focus on the future, several voters seem to be doing the opposite and voting for “>10% only” because they think it was how things worked and it will be easier to keep it the way it has been. Merits of that argument aside, it isn’t valid because “All nodes eligible” is, in fact, how things worked throughout the bulk of Rocket Pool’s pDAO history.

Conclusion

While the protocol’s quorum itself isn’t immediately threatened with either strategy, the loss of voting power to node operators that previously had it combined with the misinformation that “>10% only” was the status quo has given me the supplemental feedback I requested in my original post to make a decision. I will be changing my vote to “All nodes eligible” as that does match the status quo and thus is what I believe many “>10% only” voters intended to do.

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While the outcome of the vote is pretty much set in stone at this point, I’ll leave you with my thoughts.
First, I base my judgment on the purpose of this vote.
I believe the purpose of this vote is to clarify the unclear language in RPIP-4 as soon as possible to address the unstable status of the sub-10% nodes, which is an issue that needs to be addressed quickly, especially given the recent drop in RPL prices. Therefore, based on the purpose of clarifying the unclear language, I think we should keep it simple and revise the language to the original intent of the core development team. This is not to say that a consensus to the opposite would delay resolution, but I also don’t believe that enough time has been given for consideration and debate to warrant a vote to change the original intent. If less than 10% of nodes are allowed to vote, I think other options should be considered, such as giving them a linear vote, for example.
Next, I make a judgment about the right to participate in governance.
First and foremost, we need to keep in mind that the less than 10% nodes are not the weak (or poor) that need to be protected, and conversely, the 100%, 150% highly collateralized nodes are not the strong (or rich) that need to make concessions. The question of voting participation right now is just an equitable contractual relationship. It’s just a fair contract that says certain rights are triggered under certain conditions.
I don’t see why a condition that requires a person to purchase and stake protocol tokens to participate in the governance of a protocol is a harsh, unfairly exclusionary condition for participation in governance. They can always swap their other assets for RPL and deposit them to regain voting rights. Why give voting rights to someone who isn’t willing to participate in the protocol to that extent? They’re already getting 14% commission and community support.
Next, base my judgment about the RPL incentive.
We all know that the RPL price is important to the protocol, so we need an incentive to maintain that price, and I think the governance right can help, albeit in a small way. Maintaining the collateralization rate above 10% is recommended by the protocol for security reasons, and nodes that don’t follow it still enjoy the 14% commission and community support. Some accuse those who voted for 10%+ of being greedy, but being greedy is a relative concept. To me, the greedy are those who want to enjoy all the benefits of the protocol without following the protocol recommendations.
While the fundamentals of the protocol are most important to the price of a token, its appearance is also important. Having one more thing to answer when potential buyers ask “What incentives do you have to keep the RPL price up?” can only help. Voting is only one of many incentives, but I believe that giving the appearance that RP cares about maintaining the token price helps to attract new node operators not harm it.

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Popping in to say I’m proud to be part of this community. To me it’s absolutely not about the outcome of the vote, but about how we got to the finish line. I saw passion on both sides, which was overwhelming civil and dedicated to strengthening a protocol we all care about.

I wanted give a huge thank you to @umeku @rocketdoc @datanexus @daserdog @sfbahr.eth @ib1gymnast @vetinary @regexbuster @a35u @takezo the bot got me- and others below all of whom posted for the first time on the forum, or came back after an absence to elevate this discussion (some I know are very active on discord/reddit/twitter). I’m a little afraid to ‘@‘ darcius for his return to the forum, but obv a big thanks to him and the RP team too! We definitely all win when more people volunteer their time, passion, and voices to governance.

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@hackworth @yeehaw @hanniabu @5dayoldburrito @endressb @egk10 @dkderek @fraz @astoneta

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@mdb @thomasg @bawcey @mattkunke @deukey

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Just for posterity purposes, and to help anyone onboarding in the future, the pair of votes concluded on October 24th, and can be found on snapshot here:

Both votes successfully made quorum. ‘All nodes eligible’ was the majority outcome in both votes, meaning that going forward, all nodes will be eligible to vote regardless of their effective RPL stake.

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