Forum reference mechanisms

Governance examples

Transferring value from one post to another

The figure displayed illustrates a scheme for redistributing power from Post1 to Post2.

In this case we can imagine governance concluding that Post1 was bad and Post2 was good. Then governance makes Post3 with power 10 REP and validates it. Then in the displayed example the Forum WDAG has been revaluated, i.e., re-weighted. This is the primitive that allows governance to review previous judgements and correct mistakes made in the past. The incinerator is a complication that allows this re-weighting action to keep the total graph weight constant.

This isn't the only way to achieve re-weighting. But every approach has its own advantages and disadvantages. This one encourages stability because it is particularly inefficient. E.g., it costs 10 to move 10, and 10 REP is destroyed. So a serious effort is required to reweight the Forum to correct past mistakes. This effort requires the sacrifice of 10 REP on the part of those who make the change (the 10 REP from Post3 was governance value).I believe this will lead to greater stability than another system we can also offer, which allows people to revalue the forum by governmental fiat. By this, I mean we could make a primitive that allows any distribution we wish without any cost in REP. That would be dangerous, because one validated post could put all the value of the entire WDAG into any new account the poster wishes. But it would be extremely efficient if the DAO wishes to move quickly and trusts its governance. With our current example primitives, you could also require as a soft protocol an even more restrictive governance protocol to only allow absolute value redistribution less than the value of a post. Then for instance you would need to use Post3 to only leach 10 and incinerate it, then a Post4 is required to donate 10 to Post2. With this soft protocol restriction it would take 20 REP and two posts to achieve the same redistribution that 10 REP completes with one post as demonstrated in the displayed figure.