Holographic Consensus by Matan Field

🌱 Ecosystem R&D
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Q.) In our community Telegram it was asked by not_un: "Could you be more specific in describing Holographic Consensus ?"

A.) Answered by @Matan [DAOstack Architect]:

ANY decentralized governance system (DGS) has a real, inevitable tension between scale (number of decisions to process at a given time) and resilience (decisions are made in line with majority “truth”/will, as weighted by voting power).

To solve for scale a DGS has to allow for decisions to be obtained without ABSOLUTE majority, where absolute means with regard to all voting power (rather than with regard only to those who voted - called relative majority).

But to maintain resilience, those “edge decisions” must be GUARANTEED to be in line with the majority.

We call this effect “holographic consensus”, where under some special conditions any decision obtained, by arbitrarily small group, would reflect perfectly the opinion and knowledge of the majority.

This resembles the effect of a hologram, wherein every piece of the hologram actually contains the information of the entire image.

a) allow some decisions to be obtained via relative majority, without any quorum needed;

b) protect the collective attention by limiting the number of those proposals;

b*) make this protection dynamic (so that more proposals can penetrate the collective attention if there’s more security in place; and vice versa, drive more security when more proposals penetrate the collective attention);

c) filter those proposals to have good ods to be approved;

d) crypto-economically monetize and incentivize for the finding and signaling of mismatches between active proposals status quo and the DAO predicted truth (the would-be decision once everyone look at it). this would be the critical element.

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I’m looking forward to seeing more details on how this’ll work for sure!

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One important question is what are the safeguards to protect this system from being “gamed” by way of collusion, such as mapping out the paths to relative majority adoption and having those actors reach a minority consensus that goes against the will of the majority.
Even more tough to protect against is a secret smart contract that knows the mapping of the system, the amount at stake and how many votes are missing to adopt of proposition such as stealing the funds: it then displays missing votes and will display “if x more people vote you will get x percent of stolen funds according to the prorata of votes you contribute”, people can even anonymously commit until an opportunity arises and then smart contract executes in autonomy.
In this scenario even initially non adversarial parties could be tempted to collude if chance of being discovered and penalties are too low (or un-enforcable under code is law principle).
In a majority consensus and with different mining algorithms 51%+ attacks are quite difficult to execute but under this system consensus threshold could be way lower “at the edges” and no penalties (if the attack is successful with stake return) as there is no staking (be it computational work, hardware or financial).
Does anybody of the team have a technical paper on Holographic consensus and different attack vectors? (in my case a non-technical response would suffice)