Currently, voting for Helium Improvement Proposals (HIP) has a special set of rules. The newest HIP offers a drastic change to the voting rules and the “weight” of each vote. While the previous HIP was accepted with a near unanimous vote, HIP 60 will be much more debated.
Current HIP voting rules
Right now HIP votes are tied to the HNT stake each user has. The so-called Voting Power is calculated by the amount of HNT and stacked HNT wallet balance. This means people with… “bigger wallets” can have more voting power for HIPs. At least that’s the layman’s explanation.
In reality, things are different. The rules were set in place to constrain voting and give it a bit more validity. Initially, HIPs were voted on Helium’s Discord and there was a need to turn it into a more legitimate process. As such, the HeliumVote website was created and HIPs were pushed via the Helium app. To make sure voting is more fair, the identifier was added via the DC burn transaction of approximately $0.35.
Proposed changes
According to the HIP authors, there’s need for a bit more changes. Currently, the voting system doesn’t account for each voter’s participation in the network infrastructure. So, someone who has invested a lot more money, time and effort into building and expanding the Helium network could have the same or even less voting power as someone with little to no effort.
Thus, HIP 60 proposes to add a correlation between participant stake in the network and voting. “Tying voting power to number on onboarded hotspots, validators, and/or DC held by routers provides a fair and logical basis and “stake” in the vote, which mirrors the voting party’s stake in the network”, says the official GitHub post for HIP 60.
Basically, the idea is to tie voting to the number of Helium infrastructure devices you have. At the most basic level, this is a “one miner – one vote” concept. So, if you have more than one Helium hotspots, or you also have a validator, router, etc., you will be able to vote more than once for future HIPs. The authors say “the vote should be weighted accordingly to incorporate the relative network utility value contributed by a given entity respectively.”
Also, HIP 60 proposes to limit voting only to “any entities / network participants that are defined as “contributing network utility”. This means that only any entities that are involved in operating the network itself (transmitting / receiving data, routing data, validating PoC receipts / securing the network) are governed by and therefore have “stake” in voting on changes to the network.”
Possible drawbacks
The author notes there’s a possible drawback for the proposal: “larger private fleets will inherently have larger weight in votes than they presently do, which has a perception of “big money” controlling the vote”. “This is, however, no worse off than the present method of tying HNT balance to vote weight”, they also add.
HIP 60 doesn’t foresee “fundamental changes” to the way the actual voting is done. “The key distinction is that the hotspot count on each voting wallet is what is taken into consideration for vote weight as opposed to simply allowing any wallet(s) to burn DC to cast votes”, the proposal states.
Additional details that are yet to be considered are whether to make possible to see how wallets and hotspots voted on future HIPs. They could be changed depending on any privacy or other concerns.
Initial reactions
Unlike HIP 59, this proposal ignited a lot of discussions in the Helium community. They are lively on Discord, GitHub, Reddit and other places. HIP 60 is still in the early discussion phase, so there’s time before the voting begins and more changes could be brought to the fold.
A lot of Helium users are also bringing other ideas to the table. Some offer a completely different voting system (these proposals are more likely to become separate HIPs in the future if there’s enough interest). Others dispute the changes and prefer to not change the current process. HIP 60 is definitely poised to provoke a lot of discussions.
