the fact that its basically just a circlejerk... go read about the delegates that are no longer contributing to bitshares yet are still delegates.....
think of dpos as a rigged election... thats the best way to look at it.. here is some reading material to show you why what i say is the truth
DPoS is a plutocracy where people use (but, neither spend {“democracy”}, nor risk {“capitalism”}) their money to elect 100 senators, who sign blocks in a sequence and thus secure a nearly-P2P network.
As usual, we’re going to ignore all of the problems with this (that plutocracy implies same-wealthy-idiots-on-every-decision and inevitable decadence [unlike “rule of the experts” capitalism], that DPoS strongly concentrates wealth [and, therefore, protocol-control], that voters [even at the more-efficient corporate governance level] never seem to know or care about the issues they’re voting on, and that any conspiracy of 67 delegates can profitably double-spend without getting caught).
Instead, I’m just going to show that (again, for the Bitcoin issuance schedule) it is consequentially the same as Proof of Work.
In Theory
Theoretically, what is attempted is: [1] “Every non-attacker will know which 100 delegates are right for the job…”, [2] “…in a way that is not reliably subverted by human ‘work’…”, [3] “…and, since, attackers wouldn’t ever own >50% of the total money supply…”, [Conclusion] “…the network will always be safe.”
Obviously [2] is the deal-breaker, and [1] isn’t helping.
If you “get it” by now, I suggest you skip this section (to “The Coinbase-Rot Paradox”). However, because it happens to be a personal interest of mine, I’m going to write several paragraphs about how “voting” is only effective when it is cheap to cast an informed vote (which isn’t the case in DPoS).
Money and Politics
Votes are bought. Not directly (this would challenge the voter’s treasured self-delusions, and be a focal point for coordinated outrage), but indirectly through tax breaks, welfare, military action, subsidies, research grants, licenses, etc. Loudly, it is claimed that these all serve civic purposes (the reality is “some”), but the quieter subtext is: “a vote for Candidate X is good for your bottom line”. On top of that, there’s ad-spending and professional campaign management. Because election-competition is zero-sum, these activities cancel each other out and are net “wasted work” for society.
Is vote-buying a bad thing? Who really knows (considering the long-run coordination problems facing this species…)? For today’s post, who cares?
I’m not arguing that this is “good” or “bad”, I’m just arguing that it’s “true”.
Votes become easier to buy as the number of voters increases. Though it may seem innocuous to say “the more voters there are, the less each individual vote counts”, the statement is in fact a grave paradox. Eventually, the sheer quantity of voters guarantees that each individual voter is irrelevant – a balloon inflated to such a grand size, that the stretched plastic simply vanishes altogether. If 3 people vote, a single vote can swing a possible tie, but if 10,000,001 people vote, a tie probably won’t even occur (making each individual vote completely irrelevant). The voting process can be defeated entirely, by taking a small “critical mass of uninformed voters” and, to it, adding some self-fulfilling expectations of hopelessness.
If informed voting were cheap, these self-fulfilling expectations would be expensive to generate. Unfortunately, voting is not cheap, voting costs energy that most people won’t spend. This small detail means that any politician who can quietly use public resources to finance their bribes will always have an overwhelming advantage.
Wealth Isn’t Unequal Enough
What about the fact that DPoS votes with wealth instead of per capita? The improvement is insufficient: while wealth does distribute non-uniform (instead: lognormal or power law) a project aspiring to “world wide ledger” status will eventually have a very high quantity of people in each wealth-class; so many that casting an informed vote will still be (for each individual) a waste of time.
Voter apathy reliably strikes the more optimistic scenario of modern corporate governance. There, each share gets a vote, and disinterested parties can sell and abandon their need to vote altogether (impossible in DPoS). The ability of shareholders to elect the board of directors makes almost no difference; most shareholders don’t care enough to vote, and certainly not enough to learn-or-do-anything-about obviously corrupt phenomena such as executive pay, poison pills, empire building, golden parachutes, etc.
DPoS, like all voting, is not capitalistic. Capitalism is not about “one dollar, one vote”, it is instead “one dollar risked, one vote”. Capitalism requires the potential for gain as well as the risk of loss. With voting, gains for “good votes” are public, and equally and widely dispersed (no potential for private gain), and voting is free (no private risk of loss).
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