Could the threat of a hard fork be used to counterbalance the risks of plutocracy? For example, by burning the wallet balances of the “rich” to remove their voting influence? In other words, could the nash equilibrium for on-chain governance (one token, one vote) be the state whereby governance is incentivized to minimize the risk of a fork (e.g., a fork caused by majority due to the wealthy not doing what’s in the interest for the masses)? This is somewhat analogous to PoW whereby the risk of a fork is minimized due to game theory regardless of hash power. In other words, a “rich” miner is disincentivized to fork the chain after considering the likely choices of the other miners to stay true to the original chain.
I think the threat of hard fork is negative in several ways. The fact that Tezos can do amazing things without having to fork like other chains is one of the largest driving forces in the adoption. I certainly don’t think you want to penalize someone for holding more stake in the ecosystem. If there were a fork, wouldn’t most bakers lose a form of income from the delegators anyway? Similar to your last point, If I disagreed with the way my baker was voting, I would redelegate to someone who sees eye to eye on the topic at hand.
This causes a few problems when you get to the really big boys and the general public who may not be active in the ecosystem. (Coinbase, Binance, etc.) It also makes the water murky if you start removing voting influence from large holders. They could simply divide their holdings into smaller bakers to keep or possibly increase their power.
I think that in the future we should look into a system where each Tez is tied to a vote. My wallet, delegated to Baker A that holds 100,000 xtz is worth 100,000 votes. The system should be optimized that if I trust my baker to make a decision, I can delegate my voting rights to him. If I want to vote opposite, or ensure my vote goes the way I want, I would like to see something like a ticket, that ties the Tez in my wallet account to my vote. If those Tez are delegated to Baker A and they hold 200 rolls voting for prop A and I want to vote for prop B, Baker A should only have the voting power of the remaining 87.5 rolls.
Eventually, I think something will get proposed that is less likely to have a high approval rating. I think we are a long way from that point but it’s always good to have already formulated solutions so you aren’t scrambling.
