Experimental Voting Effort Aims to Break Ethereum Governance Gridlock

As the community debates the various pros and cons of such proposals, Buterin has begun working with economics researcher Dr. Glen Weyl to experiment with the idea of enabling a new kind of voting for the ethereum users.

Speaking to CoinDesk, Weyl, who received a Ph.D. in economics at Princeton University and is now a researcher at Microsoft, explained that quadratic voting aims to focus voters on issues they are passionate about and educated on.

Rather than votes being distributed equally across participants, users can purchase extra votes to have a greater say in certain issues.

Buterin and Weyl write, the quadratic voting proposal is a more "Moderate alternative" to other forms of decentralized governance.

"Citizens can use a currency to buy votes at the cost of the square of the votes bought on the issues that are most important to them," the blog post states.

Weyl echoed this in conversation to CoinDesk, saying, "We would like to make a voting system where people make trades, so I give up the things that are less important to me and you give up the things that are less important to you, we all are happier."

In an effort to block a small number of the financially elite to buy up a large portion of votes and in turn disproportionately affect outcomes, the system would make the price per 1,000 votes, 1,00,000 credits, which should prevent that from happening.

For one, more traditional voting structures whereby every person gets a single vote don't take into account that some people have a bigger stake in the system.

Weyl said that quadratic voting can only work if voters are pegged to identities, otherwise, it is as liable to manipulation.

Overall in spite of whether a quadratic voting system gets instituted into ethereum, Weyl hopes that going forward, the blockchain will provide a "Critical testing ground" in order to scrutinize the effectivity of quadratic voting, potentially to scale it up to bigger political systems.