Hive and Its 30 Days Deferral of New Stake Influence on Governance Voting

Any HIVE powered up today has no influence on governance voting (witnesses or DHF proposals) until a window of 30 days would have passed since the powerup. Did you know that?

If you are an old timer on Hive, you probably did. But if you would have created a new account, powered up some Hive, and voted on, let's say a DHF proposal with it, and didn't see your account in the voters list with the corresponding HP amount, would you have thought about this explanation? Maybe, maybe not.

I thought about writing this post after seeing that @sps.dao didn't seem to vote on the Splinterlands DHF proposal, despite buying and powering up 1m HIVE. After a discussion with @revisesociology and some tracking, I realized what was going on. They proxied their governance vote to @steemmonsters account, which is fine. But the proxied amount that account voted with was way below 1m HP which is the HP of the SPS DAO alone. That's when I realized what was going on, that their vote was deferred for 30 days since the power up(s). At further investigation, look at this:

Note the two Delayed Votes and the value of those votes in VESTS, corresponding to the two times they probably attempted governance voting, on the Aug 21 and Aug 31. After 30 days from each of them, their governance vote action will become effective.

Now, for anyone who may be outraged by this and that you can't fully use your HIVE power from the moment you stake it, I guess it is story time.

Once upon a time, on our legacy chain (and in the first month or so since Hive forked), one could use full powers of their HIVE stake, from the moment it was staked.

Then something happened: the takeover of the legacy chain, with the help of a few major exchanges, that powered up their customers funds and sided with the attacker, perhaps initially being fouled by him. Still wrong of them to do that.

Looks like a 13-week power down process for their customer funds wasn't a powerful-enough deterrent to not do it (they were promised a HF to reduce the power down process to 4 weeks, which was delivered on the legacy chain, so they didn't have their funds stuck for 13 weeks, after all).

Anyway, following these events, on the fork that Hive is, the 30-days deferral window for governance voting was introduced, to prevent any attacker to stake a large amount of HP and immediately mess with the governance of the chain.

While that measure affects every new stake on Hive, it is a fail-safe that experience taught us is necessary.

This situation with the SPS DAO new HIVE stake and voting on the Splinterlands DHF proposal may be quite a rare situation where the 30 days deferral of the new Hive stake influence on governance voting may have an adverse effect for a normal use of the stake, given the time-sensitiveness of the vote and the sort of ongoing battle for funding which proposals need to have (which is not the best system we could have, but it is what we have now).

But otherwise, for a newcomer in an ecosystem, regardless of the amount of their initial investment, 30 days could be considered as a minimum initiation period, before they actually understand what they vote for and why, when it comes to governance. And let's be fair, 30 days is quite a short window. Most newcomers won't know much about Hive governance after many months if not years from their arrival on Hive.

Note that no one is being stopped from voting on governance, even the first minute after power up. The effects of the vote is delayed until 30 days since the powerup have passed, though.

If you have any questions, let me know in the comments below.

Posted Using InLeo Alpha