What is consensus not only technically but socially, and why does it extend far beyond democracy and assorted voting schemes? Web3 researcher Vladimir Menaskop shares his view with ForkLog readers.<\/p>\n
In 2017 ForkLog ran an article about consensus, which, among other things, said: <\/p>\n
\n\u201cMany anthropologists believe that consensus was a universal system of decision-making in early primitive societies, where people fought for survival and were highly inclined to egalitarian cooperation.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
But eight years is a long time, especially in Web 3.0 and Web3. I would also like to add a few authorial remarks.<\/p>\n
Democracy and voting<\/strong><\/h2>\n
The term \u201cconsensus\u201d has many definitions; the most complete, in my view, is provided<\/a> by the Russian-language Wikipedia:<\/p>\n
\n\u201cConsensus is a way of resolving conflicts in decision-making if there are no fundamental objections from the majority of interested parties; the adoption of a decision on the basis of general agreement without holding a vote if no one opposes it, or by excluding the opinion of the few dissenting participants.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
This definition has three important aspects. First, it stresses a \u201cway of resolving conflicts,\u201d not mere unanimity. Second, it is \u201cgeneral agreement without voting.\u201d And, finally, it allows the \u201cexclusion of the dissenters\u2019 view.\u201d<\/p>\n
Consensus is therefore much broader than the democratic way of taking decisions. We are apt to treat the latter as an unalloyed good; it was not always so.<\/p>\n
Once, liberals proclaimed the individual as the supreme value, while democrats elevated the collective, the majority. They eventually fused, and that mix\u2014liberal democracy\u2014has suited most. <\/p>\n
But it was already out of date a century ago. What are we to do in the 21st century?<\/p>\n
Let us turn to the world\u2019s best laboratories today\u2014Web 3.0 and Web3.<\/p>\n
Voting comes in many forms<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Vitalik Buterin recently set this out<\/a> in detail. <\/p>\n
Consider one specific variant: quadratic voting, used across various DAOs and protocols. By its nature it is unfair, because it either puts one group\u2019s interests first or \u201cpushes aside\u201d the interests of the rest.<\/p>\n
Much has been written on this, but the gist can be captured in the following thesis:<\/p>\n
\u201c<\/em>Governance tokens<\/em><\/a> are nothing more than the tokenisation of the <\/em>governance<\/em><\/a> process, which <\/em>suffers<\/em><\/a> from excessive formalisation and <\/em>helps<\/em><\/a> at the initial stage but badly hinders evolution and scaling.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n
Voting with an economic context is natural for many DeFi instruments. In Velodrome, for instance, locking gives you votes you can direct to specific pools, striking a balance between lobbying and objective needs.<\/p>\n
However we vote, three obvious drawbacks remain:<\/p>\n
\n
- One must express a vote\u2014be it a mark on a ballot or a checkbox. Even today\u2019s pre-curated lists (as in Velodrome or Mode) still require initial moderation and a second-stage selection by the voter.<\/li>\n
- A quorum is needed\u2014otherwise we express with a visible majority nothing beyond the fact that it exists.<\/li>\n
- Tools for recording and verification are required; without them votes are forged and cheap. Of course, there is Tally, SnapShot and many others, but on DeepDAO we still see<\/a> thousands of DAOs, not millions. <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
To be fair, the last point is handily solved by a blockchain with smart contracts. The first can be gamified and streamlined. But what about the second?<\/p>\n
Why do we always<\/strong> need the will of the majority?<\/p>\n
A banal example: you go to treat a bad tooth. Do you really care what your city\u2019s residents think?<\/p>\n
A slightly less banal one: you are already the appointed chief accountant. Do you still need a multisig approval for every transaction? In most cases\u2014hardly.<\/p>\n
Voting was well suited to governance in Athens or the Novgorod Republic. How does it fare in a global world of 8bn people?<\/p>\n
Consensus is not democratic<\/strong><\/h2>\n
The concept of \u201cconsensus\u201d is far wider than \u201celections\u201d:<\/p>\n
\n
- Negative voting is consensus. <\/li>\n
- Silence is consensus. <\/li>\n
- Active inaction is consensus. <\/li>\n
- A fork is consensus too. <\/li>\n
- A conditional-probabilistic expert council is consensus. <\/li>\n
- Much else is consensus. <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
Briefly to each point.<\/p>\n
Suppose we need a draft to become a proposal. What if 10% of DAO participants are against? Then something is wrong and the proposal is unlikely to be beneficial.<\/p>\n
In all other cases?<\/p>\n
We should meet formalities and automate the draft->proposal flow. This also allows AI agents\u2014discussed five years ago as SaO<\/span>\u2014to become part of a DAO without harming its economic integrity or reputation.<\/p>\n
Yes, that is still voting, but used only in extremis and without requiring a majority\u2014which is hard to muster. No wonder the Arrow theorem<\/a> and its offshoots exist.<\/p>\n
Or consider this. Someone asks: \u201cWho is Satoshi Nakamoto?<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n
Any answer can be interpreted thus. An overwhelming majority in crypto agree to bind the principles of anonymity, openness and decentralisation within a confinement<\/a>\u2014and they are inviolable. That is why it does not matter who hides behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto.<\/p>\n
So we need not state a position explicitly. It suffices that everyone is, a priori, agreed that searching for the creator of Bitcoin in Hal Finney, Jack Dorsey<\/a> or anyone else is pointless, because he, she or they, by not revealing an identity, declared a wish to be Satoshi rather than someone real. An image\u2014yes; not a specific SaO.<\/p>\n
Active inaction is close to this. When a software update is a matter of ideology, you can simply refuse to install it, thereby signalling allegiance to a particular group and reaching consensus with it. Yet 15 years ago, when a critical bug<\/a> arose\u2014not an ideological one\u2014updates were made almost instantly, because the consensus was: network security above all.<\/p>\n
You merely did (or did not) change the software, but you did so consciously\u2014and continued likewise.<\/p>\n
Such things are rare but do happen even in Web 2.0. One night a streaming service changed its design and\u2026 by morning the internet was full of articles on how awful it looked. People simply refused to use the updated site and the streamer reverted. That is a social, not a technical, consensus.<\/p>\n
The school of active inaction was consistently developed by Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi, and has been applied ever since. Only note: the moment you seek quick, manipulative outcomes, you achieve the opposite.<\/p>\n
An act is, for good reason, split into action and inaction. Mix the two without need and you get not a vinaigrette but a dog\u2019s breakfast.<\/p>\n
Today we have a fine example of inaction as a basis for consensus\u2014the doNONdo<\/a> project. To join, it is enough to declare<\/a> agreement with \u201cthe importance of the practice of non-action\u201d and a desire to participate \u201cfor the benefit of all living beings.\u201d<\/p>\n
A daily act of non-action from 12:00 to 12:10 (in one\u2019s own time zone, crucial for decentralisation) achieves consensus with anyone ready to do the same at that time (in their time zone). More than five years ago I began to formalise the notion of tempography<\/a>. All Web3 consensuses are spread over time so we can say precisely what has happened. What is happening, however, is always probabilistic\u2014be it competing over the chain with the greatest work done, discussing PoS and its finality, or PoI<\/span>, where there is a probability of selecting the most \u201cauthoritative\u201d node.<\/p>\n
Non-action thus becomes a new format for reaching consensus and markedly accelerates the initial screening of participants. You like everything except kefir? Excellent, you are in our DAO. You accept everything except statism? Welcome to our philosophical club.<\/p>\n
In this sense the ETC fork from ETH\u2014or any other\u2014is consensus too. A minority said clearly: \u201cNo, we will take a different path,\u201d and did so. In a democracy it is otherwise: if you lose, you follow the majority, even if you were nominally against.<\/p>\n
But democracy, I repeat, is outdated.<\/p>\n
A conditional-probabilistic expert council goes a step further. Suppose our DAO has 1,000 people. We select coders of various levels\u2014say 100. We verify \u201csenior and above\u201d\u201453 people. That\u2019s it.<\/p>\n
We then launch a nine-member council for a year to solve complex, purely technical tasks. After a year, new participants pass the same screening and join the pool of highly qualified coders. From there they may enter the expert council.<\/p>\n
No voting is needed here: an algorithm does the work after the initial social consensus.<\/p>\n
Financial consensus<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Instead of a thousand speculative musings\u2014one, but a highly important quote<\/a> from the EYWA cross-chain protocol team:<\/p>\n
\n\u201cIn an overheated <\/em>DeFi<\/em> market, many projects offer on-chain activities using points to account for future rewards, thereby ensuring flexibility in distributing incentives. We decided not to limit ourselves to this approach and to offer our community an alternative with a more transparent mechanism. In the Early Farming programme, users receive real rEYWA tokens instead of abstract points.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Here the synthesis of economics and technology is clear: if you conceptually agree with a project\u2019s tokenomics, receive a slice of the project now, not later. Few today doubt that a token is precisely a tokenised part of a project\u2014especially after Linea created its XP at the SBT level.<\/p>\n
You may object that this is not consensus at the level of a technological solution\u2014and I would agree: more than five years ago we arrived<\/a> at this in our DAO Synergis research.<\/p>\n
But what matters here is that projects are seeking a consensual order<\/strong> for connecting users to their capacity, rather than merely flirting through gamification and airdrop promises.<\/p>\n
It is one thing to promise to do something; another to start doing it immediately\u2014provided you accept the basic condition. I expect this approach to remain popular: it onboards faster and separates wheat from chaff.<\/p>\n
I cite EYWA advisedly. Even at the level of purely technical decisions the team have an understanding<\/a> of the importance of consensus:<\/p>\n
\n\u201cMoving assets between L1 and <\/em>L2<\/em> entails significant time and financial costs, to say nothing of the risk of one of the bridges being hacked. EYWA solves DeFi\u2019s liquidity fragmentation with a Consensus Bridge that creates a kind of \u2018consensus\u2019 between bridges, minimising risks during cross-chain swaps. Compromising any bridge during an exchange will lead to data mismatch and, as a result, suspension of the transaction. This approach gives users the opportunity to return funds to the source network.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n