Interview, Fireside Chat
a16z Podcast | Voting, Security, and Governance in Blockchains and Cryptonetworks
- Electronic voting protocols and blockchain systems are expected to lower the costs of vote buying and bribery by enabling vote verification or leveraging permissionless models that allow unrestricted participation and key generation.
- Governance mechanisms face a high risk of degenerating into plutocracy through direct vote buying, the "Dark DAO" model which creates frictionless cartels, or identity manipulation via the dark DAO model.
- Proposed countermeasures include receipt-free voting, coercion-resistant schemes, and quadratic voting, though the latter remains vulnerable to Sybil attacks if secure identity association fails.
- Malicious actors are predicted to subvert networks by acquiring coins in competing projects, executing consensus layer attacks, or front-running transactions, potentially making the economy of arbitrage larger than observed trading volumes.
- Resource commoditization and Dark DAOs could substantially subsidize attack costs by allowing attackers to rent, perform attacks on, and resell resources like hash power, while creating information asymmetry to profit from shorting.
- Economic threats involving gas tokens, front-running, and the Ethereum "pay once, store forever" model are anticipated to compromise security and create a tragedy of the commons regarding storage and transaction costs.
- Future developments such as Project Chicago aim to analyze the pricing and exploitation of blockchain commodities like computation, relay networks, and storage within these hostile economic environments.