Lisk Improvement Proposal: Is It Here The Future Of Consensus?
In these days there is a huge activity in Lisk.Chat! The Lightcurve Science team has just opened the discussion for the 11th LIP – Change to one vote per account in Lisk DPoS.
A Lisk Improvement Proposal (LIP) is a design document providing information to the Lisk community, or describing a new feature for Lisk or its processes or environment.
The voting system has been extensively discussed in the community in the past, starting from December 2016 (https://github.com/LiskHQ/lisk/issues/353). Lisk team is now approaching the roadmap phase “Delegated Proof of Stake” so this discussion goes in that direction.
This LIP proposes a change of the voting system for the election of delegates. The team suggests to only allow one vote per account with a vote weight given by the balance of that account. The goal is to increase the decentralization of the network by disincentivizing coalitions between active delegates and creating a healthy competition for active delegate slots. Moreover, the proposed voting system is very simple and encourages a high participation of stakeholders.
Lightcurve Cryptographer Jan Hackfeld was also on Lisk.Chat answering some questions around this LIP. Some points addressed in the discussion are as follows (source):
Delegates sharing high percentages of rewards (less incentive for voters to adjust votes): it will probably be a mix of people that will vote for themselves and people that will support active delegates; the community will determine which direction the system moves. It could be discussed if a minimum LSK stake for delegates should be enforced by the protocol; in this case everybody would be interested to keep productivity high as otherwise, they lose money.
Other LIPs that will be included within the Delegated Proof of Stake phase: The objective ‘Punish protocol violations by delegates‘ will add a mechanism to the protocol that punishes a delegate if it can be proven on the blockchain undoubtedly that the delegate acted maliciously (e.g. double-forging). The whole proposal will be released on the mailing list quite soon.
Along with this, the objective ‘Improve blocks verification’ proposes to add Byzantine fault tolerance to the protocol. This means that the protocol will tolerate malicious/Byzantine delegate up to a certain threshold.
Whales domination: supposing that around 500,000 LSK will be needed to secure a forging position, it will be possible that 101 whales will dominate the system and get more and more slots thanks to the rewards they obtain.
Account splitting: with the new fee system the minimum fee to send a voting transaction will depend only on the final size of the transaction. One of the main objectives is to promote a dynamic voting system. A LSK holder would be able to split his stake and vote for different delegates with a voting power proportional of the amount of LSK on each new account
According to Nimbus, the real problem with DPos is lack of anonymity in voting: delegates can simply look up what accounts have and haven’t voted for them and leverage that knowledge through rules to strengthen their forging positions. Also TonyT908 supported this idea, stating that “if anonymous voting could be achieved, I believe that would lead to a drastic improvement to both our current system of voting, as well as to the newly proposed one”. Lisk is not a privacy coin, but this idea could be further discussed.
We already featured this topic in an article and we will continue to follow this discussion. Stay tuned!
Don’t forget to vote in the latest #LiskPoll!
The latest LIP created a lot of discussions, it’s time for a new #LiskPoll!
Which is your favourite consensus model? @LiskHQ@39Lisk @kplusq @BLOQspace @HighlightsLisk @LiskEcosystem @Ooooooomin_365 @LiskCentAm @Lisk_news @LiskCentAm @MatPiaggi @liskholder @Crypto_renren— Lisk Magazine (@liskmagazine) 8 febbraio 2019
Sign up to the Lisk mailing list and follow the latest conversations: https://lists.lisk.io/mailman/listinfo/lips_lists.lisk.io
View the abstract and proposal in full: https://lists.lisk.io/pipermail/lips_lists.lisk.io/2019-February/000016.html
Join the discussion: https://lisk.chat/channel/delegates-discussions
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