Vote on the Initial Cardano Constitution

I am voting YES on the ongoing governance action to establish an initial constitution for the Cardano blockchain ecosystem.

Governance Action Hash: 8c653ee5c9800e6d31e79b5a7f7d4400c81d44717ad4db633dc18d4c07e4a4fd00

The metadata for my vote is located here, and this blog serves as a more human-readable form of that justification.

Justification

I believe the proposed constitution has material faults, and have provided some suggested revisions below. However, I don’t believe that any of those faults are fundamentally in violation with my values or damaging to the Cardano ecosystem, and am a realist that recognizes that total consensus at this scale is impossible; I believe the constitution to be fundamentally sound, and believe that progressing forward, rather than stalling, will ultimately be more productive to achieve the goals we have as an ecosystem. As such, I have decided to vote Yes, with the hope that future revisions of the constitution can address these items of feedback.

As a reminder, you can find my values here.

Here is how I evaluate the constitution against each of my values:

Integrity - The constitution is a good faith attempt by hundreds of individuals to faithfully capture the ethos of the Cardano ecosystem; No aspect of the constitution is a result of or encourages duplicity in my mind, and the process used to generate it is one that attempted to minimize that risk.
Freedom - The constitution does a good job of enshrining the freedom of association, such as tenets listed in Article 1.
Social Good - I believe that the constitution establishes a framework for the Cardano ecosystem to contribute to the evolving social good of society. It enshrines economic sustainability, separation of powers, and guard rails on abuse that are essential to such goals.
Technical Soundness - I believe that most of the constitution is technically sound, if imprecise. The thresholds set on protocol parameters are reasonable with respect to my understanding of the Cardano blockchain, and do not pose a threat to it’s continued operation or continued evolution.
Economic Soundness - The constitution outlines a framework for growing the treasury, managing the spending, and ensuring that withdrawals are subject to the scrutiny of the Cardano ecosystem. I believe that it could go further in establishing priorities in increasing revenue for the chain, and streamlining the budget process, but the proposed process is not unworkable and can be refined in future revisions.
Effective Discourse - The constitution establishes expectations for various community members on publishing a code of conduct and/or ethical framework, which I believe contributes to the ability for the ecosystem to engage in effective discourse.
Transparency - The constitution was written in public, revised heavily in response to public feedback, and is the result of the input of 10s of thousands of voices. While initial drafts were written among a small group of individuals, these underwent significant revisions in public, and represent responsible Cathedral and the Bazaar separation that led to effective work. I believe that this distinction could have been communicated clearer, and while there may be some people who worked on those who thought of them as final, the final drafts differ enough from those early drafts to contribute to a confidence in the process for me.
Flexibility - The constitution leaves room for and even encourages future revisions. This may be uncomfortable for some, but given the untested nature of what it tries to accomplish, is an essential component working towards the flexibility that I value.

Criticisms

Below I present a few criticisms and suggested revisions that, while substantive, do not undermine the core operation of said constitution.

Article 1

Section 1

These below Tenets shall guide all participants of the Cardano Community,

I do not believe the constitution can make such a broad claim. Our community will have bad actors, and will have members who diverge from these opinions.

Instead, I believe the constitution should restrict it’s statements to either those that should govern the constitutional committee alone, or aspirational claims, such as:

These below Tenets broadly guide all participants of the Cardano Community, as established by an on-chain vote, and shall bind the actions of the Constitutional Committee to faithfully uphold.

In Tenet 4, there is a focus on SPOs, DReps, and CC members. It leaves out the contribution of those building on and integrating with Cardano. I would suggest a revision to:

Contributions by the Cardano Community on the Cardano Blockchain shall be recognized, and, where appropriate and decided on by the governance process, shall be compensated via on-chain or off-chain mechanisms and tokenomics.

In Tenet 10, I believe the restriction to 45B ADA is not in alignment with my values of social good or flexibility. I believe that fixed-supply tokens are a phsychological trick used to disproportionately reward early adopters. While such stability is useful early on, and benefits the Cardano ecosystem for the forseeable future, I believe that the long-term scope of Cardano could eventually require or benefit from a healthy, algorithmically controlled inflation to incentivize investment, fund continued operation, and replenish ADA lost to burnt keys. I believe having such a hard line early on runs the risk of this aspect becoming dogmatic, rather than pragmatic, and will be weaponized in the far future to stifle what’s best for the Cardano ecosystem as a whole.

I would instead revise this tenet to:

Financial stability shall be maintained. To that end, the total supply of ADA shall not exceed 45,000,000,000 (45q lovelace) until and unless such a time as such a change to the tokenomics is deemed essential to Cardano’s survival and approved by constitutional revision.

While this is just acknowledging a reality that the constitution can be revised, it makes it clear that we as an ecosystem do not hold this “sacred”, beyond a reaction to abuse that such inflationary mechanisms can and have been leveraged for.

Section 2

I believe the details relating to the guardrails script, this early in the constitution, are too technical, and should be moved to the appendix.

Article 2

Section 1

I believe this section is confusing. By some argument, a “private key” could be considered a “membership”. I think the first sentence should be revised to:

Use, participation, and benefit from the Cardano Blockchain shall not be restricted by any form of approval subject to the whim of any individual or group.

I also believe that the third sentence is overly broad; The constitution is unable to enforce an obligation to anyone but the constitutional committee, and so saying that all Cardano Community members are expected to uphold the constitution amounts to a form of making empty threats.

Article 3

Section 3

I believe the language here should include the word “sufficient” ADA. If someone has the minUTxO ADA, they will be unable to build and submit a transaction casting a vote, or satisfying the deposit requirements, etc.

I also think we should emphasize here that governance begins off-chain, as governance actions are proposed, discussed, revised, and only finally submitted on-chain.

Section 5

I do not believe the constitution should be instituting any requirements on the metadata, such as mandating an abstract, attached to governance proposals. It should be sufficient for anyone to express themselves as they need. Instead, the constitution should direct the constitutional committee to identify and promote best practices around formatting proposals for clarity, update those recommendations as the metadata standard evolves, and grant a very limited latitude to vote no on governance proposals that make no effort to provide justifications through a form of interpretable metadata.

Similarly, the following clause is unclear, unhelpful, and not conducive to a collaborative governance environment:

The content of every on-chain governance action must be identical to the final off-chain version of the proposed action.

What is the “final” off-chain version? what happens if two people are revising in parallel? What happens if someone forks a proposal to put forward their own proposal?

These should not be grounds for disqualification: the metadata published on chain is the authoritative source, and the off-chain process that led to it is certainly helpful, but irrelevant to the final decision.

Section 6

This section, for example, is exactly what makes it unnecesary to mandate specifics about the governance metadata or off-chain process.

Article 4

Section 1

All owners of ada are expected to periodically approve one or more Cardano Blockchain ecosystem budgets through an on-chain “Info” action.

This assumes that all owners of ADA will be voting to approve the budget. I believe this should say “periodically vote on” or “periodically approve or reject”.

Section 3

I believe the requirement that the budget and withdrawal must be submitted separately is unnecesary. The withdrawal proposal should just include the relevant budget for its withdrawal. Splitting them just exposes us to corner cases where the budget is approved, but the withdrawal is rejected.

Section 4

This mentions contractual obligations, but does not nominate an entity with which these contractual obligations are made.

Article 5

Section 2

DReps may be individuals or coordinated groups.

should be revised to

DReps may be individuals, coordinated groups, or smart contract systems.

Section 6

This section amounts to another empty threat; It says DReps “shall not”, but then provides no recourse or consequences for violating this provision.

Instead, I would phrase this as more of an affirmative social expectation, such as:

This constitution establishes a social stigma against trading compensation in return for votes or delegation; and the Cardano community is encouraged to avoid in the strongest terms delegating to actors who attempt this behavior.

Article 6

Section 4

Another example of empty threats.

Article 7

Section 1

Constitutional Committee shall be limited to voting on the constitutionality of governance actions to be enacted on-chain.

This is the core enforcable aspect of the constitution, and likely a huge source of drama and confusion in our budding blockchain-civics understanding.

I believe this should be emphasized a lot more, such as with language like this:

The constitutional Committee is established solely as an executor of the will of this document. This body will faithfully vote only on the constitutionality of a proposal, and not on the merits of the proposal itself. It is essential that both:

Any member of this Committee who voids this responsibility is voted out by the Cardano Community, and

The Cardano Community understand the context of these votes, and does not misconstrue or misappropriate a YES or NO vote towards the merit of the proposal

Section 5

I would suggest replacing “may go forward” with either “can be submitted on-chain” or “can be ratified”, depending on what is accurate to the ledger.

Additionally, a vote of no confidence replaces the whole committee; I believe this section should outline a process whereby an otherwise functioning committee can vote to replace or remove such a misbehaving member, without requiring the threshold of a full vote of no confidence. Then, a committee who refuses to do so, or abuses such process, can be considered for a no-confidence vote by the committee. The point being that “No Confidence” is a heavy hammer to wield, and requires a high threshold. Many people may be hesitant to vote no confidence for “just one bad actor”, as they approve of the rest of the members, which creates a natural deterrent to dealing with abuse and cleaning house effectively.

Alternatively, a future version of the ledger should allow voting no confidence on just a subset of the committee to enable this organically at the social level.

Section 6

The Constitutional Committee shall publish each decision.

Publish how? Via metadata attached to their vote? on a blog? etc.

Section 9

Since the CC is the one body we can actually mandate the behavior of, we should emphasize that, should any member of the cardano community see a violation of any of these provisions by a CC member, they are encouraged to vote for a motion of no confidence.

Appendix 1

With regards to reverting changes, I would like to see more clarity on the definition of “not possible”. For example, if reverting the change would cause a recently deployed dApp to stop working, even temporarily, is this considered “not possible”?

Guardrails

With respect to the govDeposit, why is this considered a “critical” security parameter? Lowering or raising it doens’t impede the operation of the blockchain in any meaningful way like the other parameters do. At worst, it makes the governance process more noisy as more proposals get submitted.

So long as the guardrail introduced later to cap the size of the proposal is kept reasonable (which I don’t think it currently is), this doesn’t fit with the other parameters, in my opinion.

Throughout the guardrails, there are rules that are superfluous and implied by other rules. For example, if one rule says that the value must be greater than X, does another rule really need to say that it will be not be negative?

Finally, in several places we say that we cannot enforce things about the parameters because we don’t have access to the previous valules in the blockchain; A future hard fork should introduce this ability so that we can enforce these, as they are super important.

Conclusion

While there are substantive areas where this constitution can be improved, I believe that it represents a meaningful first step in our governance journey. Indeed, perhaps starting with an imperfect document will breed a culture of revision, evolution, and improvement that has been absent from other founding documents like the US Constitution.