Voting power distribution analysis and thoughts on alternative approach

Hi all,

1) I've been thinking about how to improve our DAO voting system and have analysed the voting power distribution of the snek vote and the latest snapshot (8/4)

[Link to Spreadsheets](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15L_4922kX4iLVCg2dUPUl7Kwin8xtZszsH_NxFzIYO8/edit?usp=sharing)

In the tabs "Snapshot 8/4" and "Snek Vote" I've plotted the Voting power distriubtion across all wallets and calculated how many wallets of the top wallets are needed for a 50% majority. 

For the snapshot it's 1% (85 wallets of 8423) and during the snek vote it was 1.75% (10 of 571 wallets).

It doesn't look very fair/democratic. But I think that most of us agree that a "one vote per wallet" approach is not the way. We do want community members that hold more tokens to have a larger say in the votes. 

2) I thought how can we make the voting power distribution fairer, while respecting the hierarchy of the token holders.

Instead of performing some mathematical functions on the number of tokens. (which could prove to be complicated or could lead to re-arranging some of the token holders order - a wallet with more tokens would end up having less voting power than a wallet with less tokens) 

I thought, why not just rank the wallets according to the number of tokens, and use that rank as Voting power. 

With this approach, we're basically de-coupling the voting power from the number of tokens, but the order of the wallets is preserved. (The more tokens, the higher the Rank and voting power)

I've arbitrarily set some rules to creating the rank (They can be discussed and changed of course):

2.1) The lowest rank a wallet can have is 1 and it has to have at least 1 token. 

2.2) Wallets with the same number of tokens are given the same rank.  

2.3) If a wallet has more than 1 token than the previous wallet, it is given the next rank. 

I've calculated and plotted the Rank-based voting power of the Snapshot 8/4 and Snek vote in the tabs "Rank 8/4" and "Rank Snek".

The Top majority is now changed to 12.3% (Top ~1000 wallets of 8423) and

26% (Top 149 wallets of 571) for the snek vote.

This looks to be an improvement to the 1-2% from our current system.

3) However, by doing that the 'low majority' actually can be achieved with less than 50% of the token value (which can be seen as a security risk). 

While in the current system a malicious actor needs 50% of the tokens to win a vote, a malicious actor would need less than 50% of the tokens to gain 50% of the vote. (The Top majority actually covers more than 50% of the tokens)

In the Rank 8/4 the low majority holds 1738600 tokens (which is 12.9% of the total supply)

In the Rank Snek tab the low majority holds 236779 tokens (5.26% of the total tokens that voted)

In this suggested Rank-based Voting power System you basically get more voting power per token, if you have less tokens. 

The top wallet that voted in the snek vote actually has more than enough tokens (627,500) to overrule the low majority (236,779) in the suggested Rank-based Voting system.

3a) I've done a quick run-through assuming it would be a malicious actor and have calculated his voting power if he would split his tokens into 100 and 422 equal size wallets. (The 422 is taken from the number of Low majority wallets in the Rank Snek tab.)

In the Rank Snek Mal 100 and 422 tabs, I've highlighted the malicous actor's wallet in red (if you scoll down). Then I've re-sorted the wallets and re-assigned the ranks to get their voting power.

In the case where the malicious actor would split his wallets into 100 wallets, he'd control 24.5% of the total voting power and in the case where he'd split it into 422 wallets he'd have 49.89% of the total voting power. It seems it's not so easy for that malicious actor to achieve a low majority with his tokens.

Just sharing my analysis on the current voting system and my thoughts on an alternative approach of creating the Voting power. And I'd like to hear what ideas and thoughts the community have. 

Is a separation of the Voting Power from the number of tokens an approach the community would like to take?

Cheers,

ahrnsetido