Question: What is "Stake-Weighted Voting"?

[mgodwin]

Hello! I see in the readme that you mention this being FMV's Stake-Weighted voting application. What does "Stake-Weighting" refer to specifically? My apologies if this is an obvious question - I've been learning about blockchain recently and haven't come across this concept before.

Also is this the right place to ask that question?

[nathanielhourt]

Hi, and welcome! This is a fine place to ask. And don't worry, that's a common question -- I'm just a little more lazy about details on the repo than on the main website. 😀

Stake-weighted voting is like shareholder voting in a company: a vote cast by someone with a large stake in the company weighs more than one cast by a small stakeholder. Shareholder voting is the best known use case for stake-weighted voting, but there are plenty of other reasons to use it as well: customer surveys, community/HOA votes, and blockchain consensus, to name a few. It's also useful as a poor-man's 1-person-1-vote system, if you give everyone the same amount of stake.

Does that answer your question?

[mgodwin]

Cool - totally makes sense. Thanks.

A followup to my initial question would be, why is the focus on creating a stake weighted voting application for FMV? (If this info is on the website you can just let me know and I'll go scour it again.) My guess is that it can be applied to many different types of voting applications than just general elections? I'm also curious too about your statement of it being a 'poor mans 1-person-1-vote system'... It seems like that would be just a specific case of stake weighted voting, but I'm interested to hear how it's less ideal 😄

I also wouldn't mind opening a PR to add additional info to the README/wiki with some more specifics as I learn about them - I imagine others will probably have similar questions as they come upon the project and want to contribute as well.

[nathanielhourt]

Why is the focus on creating a stake weighted voting application for FMV?

Because it's a comparatively easy starting point, which we can build and stabilize, then use as a platform upon which to build the more advanced anonymous, ID-verified voting features.

I'm also curious too about your statement of it being a 'poor mans 1-person-1-vote system'

The issue with using SWV to approximate 1P1V is that, while it gives the same results, it lacks the anonymity features, so someone can know who voted how. It's also a lot of extra overhead to have to create a coin to make stake in and distribute that to all the voters.

I also wouldn't mind opening a PR to add additional info to the README/wiki with some more specifics as I learn about them - I imagine others will probably have similar questions as they come upon the project and want to contribute as well.

That would make me quite happy. :) Please do! We'll be sure and send you some MERITs for your trouble.

[nathanielhourt]

Have you had time to get more familiar with the project? Do you have any questions I can answer?