In crypto, a lot of the times, it has to do with optics.
Many projects with no founder’s reward find other ways to enrich themselves, through secret premines, or getting in super early, or manipulating pumps through insider info. Founder’s reward are actually more honest but yet is frowned upon.
A good example of this is actually Grin, which claims to have been fairly launched but yet much of it was due to VCs pumping money into mining outfits (and overpaying for it) so they need to pump to protect their investment.
The same goes with governance. Most masternode voting systems are merely shams of governance and are centrally dictated. Even projects with no on-chain governance the devs that contribute the code effectively dictate almost everything (for e.g. the secret parameters for Cryptonight algorithm for Monero hard forks) and this will happen for most smaller projects.
However if we want to gain credibility, there has to be a mechanism to at least theoretically push the dev team out if we aren’t doing our job and keep us accountable. Also one of the allures of a cryptocurrency is that there is no need for central control, having an appointed ‘leader’ or team goes against this even if it’s more efficient. If it’s purely about efficiency, then we don’t need a blockchain
Also having central control also means a single point of failure. If we are compromised or forced to do something, having full control won’t be a good thing. This is why perhaps the founder of Bitcoin, Cryptonote (the tech behind Monero) and Mimblewimble choose to be anonymous.
Personally I hate politics and opening up funding for voting is always political and primed for manipulation. In fact, we have seen increasingly in this world that democracy can be a failure if populists strategies get hold.
The Iroquois confederacy model is indeed very complicated but perhaps it doesn’t have to be. I think there are two main categories of things to vote on:
Funding
Consensus Changes
For funding:
Znodes vote on proposals and need to pass with the necessary votes/quorum
Zerocoin mint holders can veto. (still need to think how to do this since you can’t tell which mints have been spent or not).
For consensus changes:
Znodes votes on proposal and need to pass with necessary votes/quorum
Zerocoin mint holders need to vote as well and pass necessary votes/quorum. The amount of quorum is determined by the funds that are in the ‘burnt’ state. If enough quorum is formed and Zerocoin mint holders vote against the proposal, the proposal doesn’t go through. Likewise if quorum is formed and Zerocoin mint holders are in favour, it passes.
If Zerocoin mint holders quorum are not enough, the proposal is put again through the Znodes again to revote.
The amount of quorum for Zerocoin mints is reduced. Same process as before that will reject/approve. If still no quorum, however, the Znodes vote passes.
Miners are not given a say since their incentives may not be necessarily aligned and since we are using commodity hardware and not ASICS, we don’t want people to ‘rent’ power to shift the vote. Miners generally are there to make money and are providing a service rather than an actual ‘stake holder’
There will be rewards for voting to encourage voter participation.
To me this allows funding proposals to go through easier but is kept in check by the power of ordinary Zcoin holders to veto funding if it is bad. Consensus changes would need greater support from both parties but if there’s voter apathy there won’t be deadlock yet giving Zerocoin mint holders the power to keep the Znodes in check.
Now some might say, well won’t the Znodes still hold sway since they would have a lot of zcoin to mint? Znode holders have to choose to keep their znodes or to break them up to do zerocoin mints and then requalify again to make them into znodes. They can’t do both. It would also be very visible as well as you will see the Znode numbers drop and then the amount of mints go up. So technically, if someone had a lot of Znodes and money and they wanted to sway it, they can do it but will lose money in the process.
One way to possibly mitigate this is to invalidate the vote if the Znodes number drop a certain percentage pending the mint votes. Have to think through this more.