Politics is science. And there are some important things that we must know when we live under Democracy.
Democracy
There is a consensus Democracy is the best political system. Many people dislike Democracy, but they acknowledge it is the least worse among all political systems ever invented by mankind.
First of all, Direct Democracy is not really feasible, because we cannot discuss with every single one every single aspect of every single matter that impacts our societies. The ancient greeks tried, but it was really hard to reach consensus and get everyone deeply analyzing every matter. Therefore, humankind evolved and we currently delegate the decisions to some people in what we call an Indirect Democracy. Those people are paid to work analyzing everything and voting in our favor. They should be able to decide better as they would be professionals and dedicate a lot of time to understand everything before deciding. In concept, they should be fit for taking such decisions for the best interests of the population.
Conflict: Public interest vs private interest
There is a clear conflict between public interest and private interest. People usually decide or vote based on their best interests, not necessarily for the best interests of the general society. Therefore, Democracy can only result in a benefit for the crowd when there are so many people voting that the sum of private interests voted is similar to the public interests.
Should voting be mandatory?
Whenever voting is not mandatory in a poll, there is the risk only a few people will decide to take a moment of their scarce free time to vote. In such a case, there are undesired implications. The main issue is that those few people who decided to vote probably did so because they were looking for an individual economic benefit.
Some countries like Brazil impose that every adult (except the elderly) must vote during elections. Failing to vote is considered a crime, unless one can prove it was impossible to reach the voting site. Why do Brazil and some other countries outlaw abstention? Shouldn't such a law be considered an act against freedom?
Countries that decide that voting must be mandatory are usually the ones that see a higher degree of conflict between public interest and private interest. In Brazil, for example, many people vote for the politician who offers them an individual benefit, such as vouchers to purchase goods. If only few people voted, this criminal practice would exponentially increase. There are other immoral (but legal) creative ways of "purchasing" votes. Economic power would determine political success. And such political success would revert on more economic individual power through corruption.
DPoS
DPoS block producers are determined by a stake-weighted voting system. The most voted ones will be elected witnesses by stakeholders. Such witnesses are rewarded for every block they produce. Typically, a witness is someone who is considered a key player for the blockchain: it must be someone held in high moral standards who is committed to making the project grow. This person usually spends time and money in favor of the community in return for their votes. Stakeholders are in charge of choosing the witnesses, so they choose the ones who do the most in benefit of the community of stakeholders. It is like a big shared and redundant private interest, therefore public interest!
Abstention: the plague of DPoS
Abstention is the biggest plague under DPoS. When only a few stakeholders vote, the statements above are not necessarily true because the witnesses are not elected by the community of stakeholders.
We have seen it happen in DECENT. The blockchain has been recently launched, which makes it a good laboratory for our analysis. There are only few people who voted for witnesses. As a matter of fact, the majority of the voters are also witnesses candidates. As a result, the most voted ones are obviously the biggest stakeholders (yes, they can vote for their own witnessing nodes) and not necessarily the ones who contribute the most to the community of stakeholders. Private interests typically come first, remember?
The solution
We cannot force everyone to vote, can we? However, we can give incentives or at least make it simpler to vote. In DECENT, the project has just started and it will surely have more and more people voting soon. When participation is high enough, the most voted witnesses will be the ones that contribute the most to the stakeholders, rather than possibly unreliable miners who create sybil (puppet) miners to increase their private gains.
Great explanation, Lightning! Voter apathy is definitely a problem, hopefully soon there will be more benevolent whales voting in the best interests of the network.
As the requirements of the role increase, the best candidates will be percolated to the top.
Agree
Best interests of the network = Best Network = Best all
Unfortunately I don't believe much in benevolence. That's why we need a large number of voters. It will dillute large stakeholders power and make it more important for a witness to contribute to the project than to contribute to their own pockets!
The crowd of voters with few DCT could use some baseline voting power. Example: Every Unique Decent User would be granted voting power equaling 5'000 DCT in stakes.
It is a very good article, it is good to know that they have very different options and voting power.
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