Tough problem, for sure. I assume many of you at the Algorand Foundation have given this issue a lot of thought. Do you foresee any promising solutions (besides KYC)? Or do you think it’s best to keep it simple, both technically and philosophically, at 1 ALGO = 1 vote?
Just spit-balling here, but this seems like the perfect use case for a decentralized digital identity solution. What if the Foundation or, in the future, a community-driven DAO, had the authority to mint non-tradeable (“soul-bound”) NFTs whose sole purpose is to be a gatekeeper to Governance. If you (don’t) have the NFT in your Algo wallet, you can (not) participate in Governance. The cost of the NFT could be formulaically determined based on the age and transaction history of the wallet such that older, more active wallets pay a lower fee (i.e., virtually free) to acquire the Governance NFT than new wallets with virtually no transaction history (i.e., a fee high enough to sufficiently deter an abusive amount of wallet splitting). There could even be community-led rules to define bot/automated behavior and exclude such wallets entirely, though I could see that being problematic for edge cases and governance voting via defi/liquid staking protocols.