Simple Tool to Better Understand the Power of Your Hive Governance Vote

Most people when they think about voting, have in mind a voting system we have participated in multiple times in our life and is easy to understand: one-person, one-vote. That's the voting system used in most democracies, in one form or another, where one person goes to vote for their preferred candidate or party every four or five years, and they only vote once for one of the choices.

Sure, people have the option to not participate, or to participate and void their vote on purpose, usually as a protest for not agreeing with any of the options to choose from. They don't influence the final result though, only a statistics that likely would soon be forgotten.

On Hive we have a different form of governance voting, one based on stake, not one-account, one-vote. The latter system has its issues, because such a system can't be implemented without KYC, and it's relatively easy to manipulate by cheap vote purchasing either by actually purchasing votes or promising things and not keeping your word once you are voted. The former can lead to concentration of power and anonymous players can be involved; vote purchasing is likely less prominent, since generally votes that matter wouldn't be so cheap to buy or influence, but vote trading can be an issue. So... probably all governance systems have its strengths and its weaknesses.

The governance system on Hive is almost identical to the one from shareholder meetings of companies, with the difference that for companies these meetings need to be scheduled and voting takes place on various matters during the meeting (or for that meeting, sent in advance), while on Hive, governance voting is a continuous process, both for witnesses, and for DHF proposals. Voting for witnesses is more or less like voting for the board of the company (there are both similitudes and differences to those roles), while voting for DHF proposals is more like voting on other proposals that are scheduled during the meeting, although DHF proposals are made to expressly allocate funds, while proposals during the shareholders meetings can decide on strategic actions of the company, mergers, purchases, etc.

On shareholder meetings of companies there is the possibility to delegate your vote to someone else (but sometimes it's done expressly for one shareholder meeting or certain points in a meeting, and not a general delegation). On Hive, we have proxy accounts which can be set to decide every governance vote instead of the accounts setting them as proxy. Until the proxy is removed, of course, or until 1 year passed without any governance action from the stakeholder setting the proxy. If the proxy account is inactive, no governance vote is cast on the behalf of the account which had them set as proxy (even if the stakeholders cast some governance votes themselves, instead of the proxy account).

All these probably seem simple to veteran users, and quite complicated to new users. If you don't understand something, it's fine, just ask and hopefully we'll be able explain better once we see where's the problem.

For people who understand well the power of their vote for deciding something like their country's parliament or president (theoretically, at least - practically, politicians often find loopholes in the system to perpetuate to power, which eventually drives voters crazy or makes them opt out), this is an interesting thought experiment: to see how much would your Hive vote be worth if you were to vote with it in general elections in your country.

This is not something you can actually do, but the thought experiment gives you some idea about the power of your vote on Hive, looking at it from a different perspective.

Here's the "power" of my Hive staking account in this thought experiment:

It is directly proportional to the (voting?) population of a country so, the same vote that would be equivalent to almost 4000 votes in general elections of my country would mean over 52000 votes in the United States...

Here's the link to the tool, if you want to play with it and test yours. @pharesim had a cool idea to implement it.

Posted Using INLEO