The goal of this thread is to discuss opting in to Snapshot’s voting privacy setting for temperature checks (snapshot) votes.
Context
Snapshot proposals are currently used to gauge community sentiment on serious topics under consideration for onchain governance votes that impact 0x protocol.
Currently, snapshot votes use the default voting privacy setting which shows the result of an ongoing poll in real time. As of October 2022, Snapshot integrated with ShutterDAO to enable an opt-in voting privacy setting which will encrypt votes while the poll is live and only review the result when the voting period is over.
Why Opt-in to Voting Privacy?
While 1 token 1 vote has made participating in governance easier, there are some major shortcomings to it as talked about by prominent people within the blockchain space Vitalik (1, 2, 3). Highlighting two of the problems here are (1) plutarchy, or the ability for wealth/capital to heavily influence vote results, (2) bribery & collusion, or the ability for highly coordinated individuals/groups to heavily influence vote results. As a consequence of suboptimal governance, we also see (3) voter apathy or low participation.
While Opting into voting privacy does not solve all of these problems completely, I think that it would be a meaningful experiment and be a step in the right direction. In terms of how hiding the current result of a vote while it is still live could address each of those three problems above specifically
- Plutarchy - increases the cost for an attacker to influence the result since it’s not clear how many votes they’d need to get their preferred outcome.
- Bribery & Collusion - reduce strategic voting for non-basic voting systems (i.e. rank-based where people might not vote truthfully if it increases the change of their preferred option winning)
- Voter Apathy - reduce the feeling that a vote doesn’t matter since it’s unclear what the current tally is
Your feedback is wanted!
What are your thoughts on enabling this feature? After the holiday season I’d like to initiate a snapshot vote on this.
Also of note, opting into this voting privacy setting on snapshot is a simple switch in the 0x Snapshot settings menu and will not cost anything.
2 Likes
I like experimenting with it and trying this one out. All the reasons you listed make sense to me, and I’m particularly impressed by how this solution could address the voter apathy problem you’ve mentioned (and it was expressed many times in the past)
- Voter Apathy - reduce the feeling that a vote doesn’t matter since it’s unclear what the current tally is
What we could do is run one snapshot vote with that setting on to see what the reaction is and if we reach quorum.
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I think for ZRX use cases to put voting private it will not change much regarding participation. I will think, on the contrary, it should be public because the voting power of delegates it’s way higher compared to voting power of general holders, so at least delegate voting should be public and encourage delegates to put reasons on voting to help holders understand why it was voted that way.
ZRX protocol is complex for most users to understand the inner workings without a good explanation out there. For instance, if we put out a vote about enabling staking or something related to rewards, we for sure will have much more interest from holders to vote, however if we put a technical update to protocol which is of higher interest but if the general holder does not understand it, the apathy will occur. People will not vote on what they don’t understand, they like protocol values and mission and that’s why they are holders (imo), they believe ZRX will be the way to go to exchange value.
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Thank you for raising your very valid concern Joao - I want to clarify that with the voting privacy setting, based on my understanding of the feature, all votes are revealed at the end of the voting period including how each person voted. The only thing that changes is what information is publicly visible during a voting period.
Taking a step back, I completely agree with you that there should be higher expectations around accountability and communication with delegates’ voting activity as they have higher voting power than a typical community member.
I think that worst case with trying out private voting is that participation levels is the same as it is now and best case is that there is higher participation. And in any case, we can always change the setting back to what it is now if the community doesn’t like private voting.
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I am in favour as the ones with bigger voting power tend to wait for voting. As a DAO representative, I tend to wait in order not to influence a result, which can lead to an unintentional missed voting.
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I agree with @gabririgo on this.
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initiated a snapshot proposal for this! Snapshot
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Sadly but true. I agree with “ initiated a snapshot proposal for this! Snapshot ”