This afternoon LiskHQ was available on Discord between 3-30pm-5pm CEST to answer questions regarding the three LIPs published to improve Lisk’s DPoS.

In Discord there were Jan Hackfeld, Head of Research, and Maxime Gagnebin, Research Scientist. They worked a lot in that time-frame, as demonstrated by the long list of the most important questions & answers shown below.

1) Why 10% of self-votes is required in the computation of the delegate weight?

Requiring delegates to have skin in the game can be tough on some small delegate with large support but low personal funds. At the same time, requiring no (or too little) skin in the game doesn’t incentivise delegates to be really careful about their setup. You are always less careful when it’s not your money which is locked. We tried to balance those two arguments and feel that 10% is a good compromised. (20% would favor big owners too much, 5% would not ask for enough commitment from the delegate).

2) Have you considered not including self-votes when calculating overall vote weight? Or at least slashing the self-vote weight? This could prevent (or at the very least, hinder) the potential of whales creating multiple delegates going unopposed.

On the Lisk blockchain, you cannot know which account belongs to which person. This means you can also not detect when somebody votes for their own delegate: people can just create another account and vote for their own delegate. Also, a whale might simply create many small accounts and you have no way of knowing if there is one person or many people behind those accounts. That is why we allow self-votes. Moreover, we actually have different locking periods for self-votes compared to non self-votes to have more accountability for the delegate themselves than for its voters.

3) Is it possible to implement those changes in steps or lower it to 5% in the beginning and when we see how many votes each delegate can get, maybe then increase it to 10%?

The percentage could technically be changed in the future. This would require a new release and the agreement of the network to switch to this new percentage. We are aiming to hit it fairly right straight away. 4) Have you considered that this 10% rule is quite unfair to people who are not actively forging already and weren’t able to invest very early on?

In the current system, those people you mention have very little change to become an active delegate. In the new system, people with a rather small amount of LSK can start forging as standby delegate (already with 100 LSK self-votes and 900 LSK external votes). Over time they can gather more rewards and votes and may eventually become active delegates. The article continues in the second part.