RE: SteemDAC: A Plan We Can Start Today to Decentralize Steem Governance

[dmitrydao]

Hi Luke. I wanted to learn about eosDAC concept for quite a while, even during the EOS Community Conference back in Seoul but I didn't have the time to do that. Finally as you outlined the same concept for Steem, I decided to write my own thoughts on that. Here's what I find challenging and I think some may agree with me too:

• It requires people to own additional tokens that are based on EOS blockchain. This is something not everybody will be happy to go through. Some people might not like EOS specifically, others might not like the idea of purchasing yet another token. You might disagree with me but I don’t see the point of buying token that is used primarily for the voting.
• If you want to go through custodian model, 12 individuals are simply not enough. It can be easily manipulated by creating a few sets of large staked accounts and vote for your own custodian each time from a selected set. There should be at least 50 custodians to make it a fair voting process but it will be way too hard to make people vote that often. People are lazy when it comes to decision making and this one is a really hard one.
• 7 days election is a fantasy. If you force a community to vote for new custodians each week, they will have to learn the background and previous experiences of new candidates each time. That will blow anybody’s mind. Nobody has that time luxury. If custodians are the same every 7 days, then it doesn’t make sense to elect them that often. Maybe a quarterly based procedure could be fine. The primary reason why frequent election may not work is because people don’t even vote for witnesses. There are over 1 million Steem accounts and only a handful are actually use this important feature.
• A separate SteemDAC account is a torture. I’m already tired of having dozens of accounts for all of the websites. It’s a lot smarter to enable login via SteemConnect for Steem and Scatter/SimpleWallet for EOS into SteemDAC website.
• The overall system sounds very complex. I do understand the power of multisig but for a person from the outside world it’s a guaranteed headache. We should simplify everything as much as possible, not to make it even more impossible to accomplish.

I'm not against the system you proposed but there are so many specific features that will not make it a successful one. Hope to have some discussions, like your contribution to both Steem and EOS.

Comments

[dmitrydao]

1. Yeah, I know. Our team (@paytomat) created a simple way to create EOS accounts as well. We leverage promo-codes that people can use to get a free account inside of our wallet. P.S. We support eosDAC tokens as well. Check it out. If users don't need tokens, then I'm cool with that.
2. Make sense but I would probably consider having custodians for each category of potential working proposals. Basically we need experts in top areas: marketing, development, community, sales and so forth. The main point is that not every custodian can have a required experience for proper proposal evaluation. Like an option each custodian can be a team of people with certain skill set(s). That would totally work.
3. My bad, misunderstood the statement.
4. I didn't know that. Now I understand why Dan moved to EOS lol. I'm not sure how long are they going to survive without smart contracts though, especially if they finally release SMTs.
5. I checked the website, it's actually quite simple to use. Nice work.

[lukestokes]

Thanks for your response.

1. No, I don't think so. As I said in my post, there are services out there today giving out free EOS accounts. If they needed more RAM or CPU or something in order to use the account, that could also be solved relatively easily via delegations. If the post wasn't clear, no EOSDAC tokens would be needed at all. That's just an example of what we've built already.

2. The voting system only allows for 5 votes, so the 12 model isn't so easy to control. Having more than 12 means nothing will get done. The whole point of a board is to take action based on the input of those who support them. Larger groups have trouble taking action.

3. You only have to vote once, not every 7 days. The 7 day period is just when the votes are tallied. I edited the post to include an extra note to clarify that. Most steem accounts are not "real" accounts, so it doesn't surprise me that many do not vote as many don't have Steem Power anyway. This governance opportunity would essentially just be for those who care (just like not everyone shows up to HOA meetings).

4. Steem does not provide smart contracts. Dan wanted to build them here but had issues with Ned and so it never happened. I don't see how this could all be done without smart contracts, but I did have an interesting conversation with @roelandp about using custom_json to accomplish something similar, so maybe it's possible, but it seems to risky to me given the money that would flow through this.

5. This document wasn't written for a general audience, so I probably should have made that clear. This is for those who are actively building governance systems with blockchain code and want to explore alternatives. The protocols used to post your comment are incredibly complex from TCP/IP to encryption to API endpoints talking to nodes which interact with the blockchain. The point of doing it right is that all that complexity is hidden away from the user so things just work. If you click through to the eosDAC member client, you'll see it's a nice experience for the user.