Protest Voting in Governance

A lot of people seemed to recognize that the proposed Q4 2022 governance measures mainly provide an illusion of choice, where the actual decisions (such as establishing “an Algorand Foundation art collection”) have already been made by the Foundation, while the role given to the governors is to vote on minor details of the decisions already made (e.g. should we spend A) 300k or B) 600k on this so called “art collection”).

If you feel that the options left for the governors are so insignificant that it doesn’t really matter which way you vote, I would like to bring up the idea of a “protest vote”.

Protest votes are votes that are cast to indicate dissatisfaction either with the available choices, or with the (governance) system as a whole.

Ideally we should be able to vote “blank” as a form of protest voting that doesn’t affect the final outcome of the vote (after all, the intent of the protest vote is to have a positive political effect, not to cause more harm than good), but since voting blank is not possible in Algorand governance, the next logical choice is to vote AGAINST the Foundation at least in all such measures where you think the difference between options A and B are not meaningful enough.

Who will join me in the protest?

It probably makes more sense to fork Algorand, go to a different blockchain, or make your own asset and run governance. Your point is well taken, but there isn’t much of any incentive to participate in governance to begin with. The idea is that it is a low risk way to get more Algo tokens, which may be a good option for big players, but for small players it isn’t really worthwhile. It’s even more risky now given Algo exposure to FTX, which may end in a wide spread asset liquidation. The network’s power is relatively centralized, so there isn’t a whole lot anyone can do to make it better outside of Foundation or the Algorand corporate entities.

Not really, Algo’s exposure was around 1 million USDc, wasn’t it?

Yeah really, FTX owns 30% of SkyBridge, which bought at least ~$250M worth of Algo last year.

That’s not good. 250 millions is a lot of money in the bear market.

SkyBridge says they are buying back, and I doubt they’d sell off their Algo at a loss at this point.

I did see they were intending to buy back the equity. I think the Founder, Anthony Scaramucci, will be on ReCoop again soon. So, I think that could give some good insight on their plan.

Definitely but with the way votes are weighted it does no good. Personally I choose to protest by not participating.

I don’t agree with your decision, but I respect your right to voice it. Do yourself a favor though, and check out Folks Finance for governance. You don’t have to vote to claim governance rewards through their platform and you’ll be helping out on-chain metrics while earning a % for yourself.

governance was designed to dodge being deemed a security so is the entire tokenomics of Algorand. there is nothing in the favor of Algorand tokenholders accept use of the blockchain. voting rights have value is an illusion as everything is predetermined by the Foundation. you have a choice of accept or reject but since the BFFs of the foundation control the chain there is really no need to vote in the first place.

Curious what your take on xGov is then? How will the Foundation control that? Why did they propose it in the first place if they wanted to retain control over the propositions indefinitely? Is this a huge setup psyop to make us believe we’re in control or should we maybe wait and see if we can see actionable steps that allow us to maybe take some of these things at face value and relax on the paranoia a bit?

I will join you in protest)

I mean I already voted there but while choosing the options to vote I had similar thoughts to yours

I should probably add an update here too, since my original call for protest votes was based on the proposed governance measures, which the Foundation updated before the measures were opened for voting.

For example, in the original proposal there was no option to vote “No” on the NFT Collection (it was called an “art collection” at the time), but only two “Yes” options, one for 300K algos and one for 600K algos. The same was true for the other measures. And that was the basis of my original argument and the primary motivation to call people to protest vote.

After the “No” options were added to the governance measures, it made the vote more legitimate and protest voting less relevant (as opposed to just sharing your honest opinion, which could still be the same as the protest vote would have been).