Bangkok, September 18, 2018. Another great Dash Tuesday from the Dash Embassy Thailand focusing on one some of the most discussed topics in current Blockchain ecosystem: ratings and governance.
We had guest speaker Marten Rauschenberg from BlockRate.org with us, a project exploring ways to use a DAO for decentralized ICO-Ratings. Martin explained how current rating systems such as user-based systems like Amazon star-ratings or centralized financial rating systems, such as Moody’s are quite improvable. In contrast to that, decentral systems like prediction markets, peer-to-peer marketplace ratings or DAO voting systems could improve rating result as they are fairer, more democratic and able to produce better data.
Of course, the question of data quality remains even in these systems. In our discussion (see our live stream) it became quite clear, that we all still struggling to come up with proper ratings for various reasons. One reason of course are different interests and evaluations of the people who are doing these rating. For example, whereas an ICO project can be a valuable investment for one VC, it can be a bad investment option for another VC.
The same argument is true for the Dash proposal system. In Dash, everyone staking 1,000 Dash can setup a master node and vote for proposals. At the same time, everyone who spends 5 Dash can put a proposal. In the end, only proposals with enough Masternode votes will get funding from the Dash treasury. The compelling argument behind this is simple: everyone who puts that much money is highly incentivized to vote in the best interest for Dash. We as Dashlers believe in this idea and it has proven to produce awesome results in the past. Yet the question remains to what criteria we should differ a good from a bad proposal and if the 1,000 Dash incentive could be improved by adding other voting systems, such as prediction markets or other P2P rating systems.
A similar argument is true for governance models. Where in the Bitcoin Blockchain, power is nowadays centralized in big mining farms and in EOS Block Producers are eligible to do many important decisions, the Masternode-vote based Dash DAO is highly decentralized. We, people of the Blockchain space, of course love this approach. If it really produces the best possible decisions on the long run has yet to be proven.
