A truly decentralised system needs also to be decentralising, meaning that it self-corrects away from centralising tendencies.
- In Cardano the stake pool admins can vote for projects they like.
- The vote weight depends on the size of the stake pools (detemined by the amount of ADA staked by the pool members).
- If a stake pool has reached a certain sitze, the stake pool members get less interest for their staked ADA.
- This causes them to join new, smaller stake pools to get more interest again.
- As a result there are more smaller stake pools than only a few huge stake pools.
But doesn't that also lead to cartels?
A large stake-holder just needs to fragment their holdings into more and more pools?
How do they overcome that?
They can fragment their holdings, but the different admins of the different stake pools may vote for different projects ... and they don't really depend on the stakes of certain stake holders because anyway their pools normally won't surpass a certain size ...
I don't say one couldn't circumvent these hurdles at all, but at least it's an interesting try, isn't it?
I'll have to dig up sources, but I do recall members complaining that Cardano had been over-run by cartels very quickly. Not sure what the feeling is now.
Using the language of Blurt, and looking towards Blurt2, if witness voters are paid a proportion of witness earnings, then the formula for that should be such that per-VP income should come down as the VP-votes increase, thereby making it more lucrative to also vote for those lower down the witness ladder.
However, for that to work it will need a different algo that selects witnesses for each block-cycle.
As always, feedback loops are necessary to avoid convergence towards centralisation.
Thanks for your input - will read the article link.
Ah, sorry to say, but that link is not really so detailed ...