On Friday, 12 June 2020, 08:51:06 GMT+1, Cuddle Beam via agora-discussion <agora-discussion@agoranomic.org> wrote: > I am EXTREMELY wary of extra vote mechanisms but I've never seen > large-scale pooling on Agora like on Blognomic so perhaps it's not a > problem. Maybe.
Pools of 3 have historically been fairly common, and of 4 have happened on rare occasions. Agoran pooling is nearly always of the "timing scam" variety, though (i.e. you hide the fact that the pool exists until the last moment so that the pooling to require fewer resources, as the opponents' resources are split); BlogNomic's are a split between that and the "we're just richer than you" variety which is uncounterable even if you know about it. The basic reason is that Agora's economy doesn't reset on a win; this means that unless everyone in the pool wins as a result of the scam (e.g. you pool extra votes to force through a victory proposal), the pooling needs to be done using only one player's economic assets (because the other players will need to be bribed to participate if they have no prospect of winning, and the size of the bribe will obviously need to exceed those players' expenditures). At BlogNomic players are willing to compete for a chance of being randomly selected for a win, because their assets are about to reset anyway; at Agora, the stakes are higher. The reason multiple players are involved in a pool is thus not to pool economic assets, but to pool "once per player per proposal", "once per player per week", etc., actions (or else actions that can inherently only be performed by one particular player); these are things that are gone if you don't use them, so they're susceptible to pooling in the same way as BlogNomic's economic assets. (For example, one pool that I remember involved three players each setting their voting power to 8, to force through a proposal that would give them a dictatorship; there was a rule capping each players' votes-per-proposal at 8 even when extra-vote assets were used, so three players were needed to get enough voting power.) Historically, though, the main barrier to direct pooling scams for dictatorships was a rule titled "Support Democracy" (which has since been repealed). It allowed any player, with 2 support, to make a particular proposal immune from interference such as vote manipulation and vote boosting. Players generally didn't do this unless they suspected a scam was brewing, so it added a huge amount of skill to pooling-based scams, meaning that you had to write a proposal that would slip under the Support Democracy radar in order to be able to land a voting-based pooling timing scam (and speaking as a Scamster myself, it was fun doing that). IIRC G. got eir patent title of Cassandra from spotting one such scam, but being unable to gather the requisite support to trigger Support Democracy. If we do want to bring back extra vote mechanisms, we should probably bring back Support Democracy at the same time (but possibly with a cost additional to the 2 support, e.g. a Pendant, in order to prevent players using a contract to just democratise everything). -- ais523
