Voting With Time Commitment for Decentralized Governance: Bond Voting as a Sybil-Resistant Mechanism

Abstract

Blockchain applications are increasingly experimenting with novel governance mechanisms that address issues that are important for their community: resistance to voter fraud in the form a Sybil attack; resistance to the formation of a plutocracy within the community; and, the ability to express preference intensity. In this paper, we take a closer look at these issues confronting decentralized governance. Our contribution is three-fold: first, we lay some analytical foundations for the formal modelling of the necessary and sufficient conditions for a voting system to be resistant to a Sybil attack; second, we show that a voting mechanism with a single instrument for expressing preference intensity, such as the quantity of tokens, cannot simultaneously achieve resistance to both Sybil attacks and plutocracy formation; and third, we design a voting mechanism, bond voting, that is Sybil resistant and offers a second instrument of voting influence (time commitment) for plutocracy resistance.

Keywords: Decentralized governance, blockchain, smart contract, voting, Sybil resistance, plutocracy, bonds

JEL Classification: D73, D82, G12