Stake-weighted Sentiment
The prototype for a stake-weighted system to gauge the sentiment towards ideas and topics that anyone can participate in, rather than just those at the top.
How many times have you struggled to figure out what’s for dinner? I sometimes find it difficult when it’s just me and one other person deciding. Now expand the group to your entire extended family and the complexity increases dramatically. Someone will need to take point on that event and spend time figuring everything out.
This same concept also applies to large decentralized networks, where anyone can join and leave, and where DPoS consensus is weighted by the amount of tokens every individual has staked. For someone to take point and lead this consensus building task requires an enormous amount of effort.
For Vaulta over the last few years, that is one of the roles the Vaulta Foundation filled. It handled this challenge by dedicating the significant amount of time and effort required to build and reach consensus. This was mostly done with direct human interaction - very similar to how you’d plan that family dinner…
I believe there are simple systems that can be built to assist in this process. Now it’s time to try and reach consensus on whether these simple systems are useful and worthwhile.
The Sentiment System
I have spent the last couple days between meetings on a prototype smart contract and user interface that I believe might help.
It’s very simple.
You can express your support or opposition to any topic posted in the system.
Your position’s weight is based on how many tokens you have staked.
You store the votes on-chain with your RAM. You can un-cast your vote to reclaim it.
Given sufficient participation, the result is a real time snapshot of the overall sentiment towards a specific topic or idea. This is similar to a multi-sig proposal, but using a topic or idea rather than a proposed transaction. It also offers an opportunity for anyone to join in.
Read on for an overview of the system and its goals - or check it out here and use it to let us know whether or not you think this system is useful.
Topics / Ideas
This system revolves around topics or ideas. The Topics page contains all active topics - sorted by the total weight involved. Each individual topic consists of a human readable identifier and a text description.
In the example below, the “sentiment” topic is about the sentiment system itself and is an attempt to determine if it’s useful.
Do you think this system is useful? Well, you have an outlet to express your position.
Support vs Opposition
Anyone can now express their support or opposition to the topic or idea being shared.
These are minimalistic blockchain actions that anyone can perform today simply by clicking one of the buttons. Do you want to see this system used more? Then support it. Do you think this is a waste of time to even think about? Go ahead and oppose it.
Each time a position is taken by a user, the smart contract will use a portion of their RAM balance to record the data. This RAM is then released when either the topic is deleted or when the user manually removes their vote.
Sentiment Statistics
The sentiment system then aggregates the positions of all participants and displays high level statistics, providing insights in to how the participants view a particular topic or idea.
And since this is a blockchain, nothing is hidden and a complete list of participants is available to see each individual persons position.
Express your support or opposition to this idea
Before we spend any more time on this though - it would be useful to know what you think about it. So we launched it as a part of Unicove and are using it now to determine the general sentiment towards this system itself.
https://unicove.com/en/vaulta/topic/sentiment
Sign in with your preferred wallet and express yourself.
This is DPoS from the bottom up, as opposed to the typical top-down we’ve always had.
Notes
A few extra bits of information if you’ve made it this far:
This system was rapidly built and so many features don’t exist yet. It’ll evolve as usage needs arise from its users.
If you want a topic posted, I’m the one that can do it currently. Just ask. I’ll post it so long as it’s reasonable. Give me a description of the topic which is short and accurate.
The success and future of this system will depend on engagement with it. If there’s no interest, we won’t pursue it and we’re out a couple days work.
This rapid release of this project was only possible because of the groundwork that existed from both Wharf and Unicove.