I thought I’d start a conversation on Ergo Democratic Governance in a forum that lends itself to long form discussion, and possibly an EIP. I don’t have any experience writing an EIP. So, I would love to hear any suggestions on how you might improve this initial draft and what kinds of proposals might work in the context of the Ergo blockchain.
I’m also adding this to Reddit. If we can come up with something coherent, I’ll be happy to submit it as an EIP. Regardless, this is a discussion we should be having.
P.S. This is not about Twitter. This is about coming up with a model of democratic governance that works for Ergo’s various stakeholders.
DEMOCRATIC GOVERNANCE
Author: X
Status: Proposed
Created: 08-Oct-2022
Last edited: 08-Oct-2022
License: CC0
Forking: not needed
Motivation
“…it is going back to debates whether it is miners, users or devs who control the protocol.” -kushti khushi (@kushti_ru), Telegram, 09-Sep-2022
There is a well-defined protocol for miners to vote on an Ergo Improvement Proposal (EIP) that impacts them, such as EIP-0037. It also appears that soft forks can be implemented based on their technical merits and Ergo developer consensus, such as the implementation of audio and video standard for the platform in EIP-0004.
In the future, as more developers join the ecosystem and different technical trade-offs need to be considered where there may be disagreement, there will need to be a more formal decision-making process.
This problem already exists in Ergo’s user population, whose only recourse to influence Ergo’s protocol and other decisions not directly related to the blockchain itself is to take to social media - such as Telegram, Discord, Reddit, Twitter, etc. There is no means to determine the user consensus, and this has shown repeatedly in the passing of the EIP-0027 soft-fork to the renaming of the eth_classic Twitter account to Ergo_Platform.
As Mark Glasgow puts it: “Everybody drawn to Ergo is very principled, some more utilitarian or opportunistic than others; and everyone should try a wee bit harder to be respective of differing opinions rather than trying to convince one side they’re ‘bad’ and the other stupid.”[3]
The issue is that it is difficult to be respectful of other positions when there is no decision-making process. Without it, communication from differing points of view turns into a race to the bottom to try to shout down opposing points of view.
There are many ways to implement a system that takes into account the preferences of users. Further, any system that is developed has the potential to also benefit both the growing developer community and miners that wish to have a greater say beyond pointing their hash rate at a particular pool or some future option from mining smart pools, such as GetBlok.