Vitalik Buterin: the quadratic vote remains vulnerable
We have already talked about the quadratic form of governance , which is about providing a better way to make collective decisions , compared to the overwhelming way of the majority.
In this principle of governance, if a participant has a strong preference for a particular decision, additional votes may be acquired, votes whose cost would increase quadratically (eg 1 vote: $ 1/2 votes: $ 4/3 votes : $ 9/4 votes: $ 16 ).
The quadratic vote ( Quadratic Voting QV ) would prevent one group to quietly make decisions just because they are more numerous: they are it will also most convinced by investing more resources.
As Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum , explained in a publication on his blog Medium on May 21 , with the quadratic vote :
"(...) citizens can use a currency" or cryptocurrency "to buy votes, at the price of the square of votes" already "bought, on the issues that matter most to them" .
And precisely, as AMBCrypto reports , the crypto project Eximchain , which is currently an ERC20 token on the Ethereum network , has announced its intention to hold a quadratic illustration contest, to be implemented with their token (EXC) , according to their Whitepaper .
https://twitter.com/EximchainEXC/status/1012992909937913861
Vitalik Buterin later praised this initiative on his Tweeter account:
https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1013892145412018176
But he also mentioned a possible problem with the quadratic vote, which he said would be vulnerable if voters can not be clearly identified and individualized , because otherwise an ill-intentioned individual wishing to manipulate the votes could easily multiply the votes without respecting the quadratic vote , by posing as multiple individuals (fake accounts, or "sockpuppets" in English).
As Vitalik Buterin mentioned in his May 21 publication:
"There have been many attempts to use the votes to gauge the community's sense of deciding potentially controversial protocol changes, but so far they have been criticized for being too vulnerable to manipulation by sockpuppets ( false accounts) or to be too biased and reflect the views only of a small group of rich money holders. "
And obviously, Eximchain planned this to secure his quadratic vote, because in response to the tweet Vitalik Buterin , they said they had planned a system of voter identification (via a KYC , Know Your Customer) to overcome this issue :
https://twitter.com/EximchainEXC/status/1013901478925340672
The technologies and innovations that blockchains bring are in full development, and are constantly trying to improve, finding solutions to problems as they go. We are really living an exciting period of technological history!