Thank you for your reply, I did misunderstand the proposal period and this addresses the concern I had. Do you (or anyone else, please!) have any thoughts on the first point? 80% is a very high bar to clear, and if Tezos potentially explodes in adoption a more conservative mindset could take hold. Certain proposals could also be disproportionately controversial for bakers specifically; the ongoing discussion on adaptive inflation being a potential example. It also just seems to me that it is not in line with the security assumptions Tezos requires for its consensus algorithm.
I was reminded of this thread after watching an excellent talk from Gavin Wood on decentralised governance. While Polkadot seems to be going all-in on decentralised governance, and I’m not sure this necessarily translates to Tezos, he made one point that I found potentially interesting. The combination of a supermajority and a quorum requirement can create incentives that actually discourage voting, as demonstrably happened during the Ithaca proposal. Shouldn’t only yay votes count towards the quorum, with the quorum requirement being downgraded accordingly? Someone who is against a proposal would then never be confronted with the question of whether it makes more sense to vote against or to abstain.
