Building trust in Mina’s development processes

Governance
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Hey everyone!

It’s Ben here- researcher in Mina Foundation’s protocol governance team :wave:

A few weeks ago, we published a blogpost that explored themes about trust and the roles of the people and organisations responsible for protocols and defining their rules. We also proposed some principles to ensure that this ‘social layer’ remains trustworthy to maintain confidence in the protocols’ rules.

This next blogpost continues exploring themes and how to apply these principles, including some examples in Mina’s social layer.

It would be great for your feedback on the draft!

Some questions to consider include:

  • What kinds of risks and benefits do you want to be identified and assessed during expert reviews as proposed in the MIP upgrade, and what principles should inform how to make trade-offs between them?
  • What further opportunities would you welcome to increase transparency about Mina’s core development process?
  • What do you think about the near term plans for strengthening community participation in core development processes?
  • What do you think about longer term ambitions for strengthening community participation in core development processes?

Please feel free to provide comments in the document linked above as you read or leave them here in MinaResearch. We are planning to publish this blogpost before the festive holidays so feedback before the end of this week would be great!

Best wishes

Ben

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Greetings All, and thank you @BenK for creating the article and for taking comments.

In your article (linked below) under the following heading, you list the goals of Mina governance.
Table 2 Defining attributes of Mina Protocol’s governance goals

Decentralizing governance is not listed in the article as a goal.
Distributed governance is listed, but that does not mean decentralized governace.
A permissioned blockchain, for example, is distributed but it is not decentralized.

Other goals listed are: Accessible, Transparent, Responsive, Coherent, Stable

Going for decentralization accomplishes all of the above goals.

This is not an oversight but rather the point of the article.
The article is about polycentric governance.
This is centers of power sharing control over Mina governance.

I understand that any governance that is not centralized and not fully decentralized may be considered polycentric, but polycentric governance should not be the goal.
Decentralization must be the goal of blockchain governance.

Decentralized governance is trustless governance and trustless governance is what we really want. We don’t want a government that we can trust. Rather we want a government that we don’t need to trust because no centralized power or polycentric power is in place to be trusted.
Blockchain is trustless finance, and we are trying to extend the technology to trustless government. That can only be accomplished by decentralization.

This idea of polycentric governance comes from the paper linked in the article and linked below for convenience.
BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY AND POLYCENTRIC GOVERNANCE.

The first listed author of the paper (Dr. Primavera De Filippi) declares she is a former member of the Global Future Council on Blockchain Technologies at the World Economic Forum (WEF).

The WEF may be the best example of polycentric governance.
The WEF represents a democracy of sorts between powerful industries and institutions rather than a democracy of individual humans.
Some members are: The World Bank, The International Monetary Fund (IMF), The World Trade Organization (WTO), Microsoft, Google, Goldman Sachs, BP, and Pfizer, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and Oxford, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The paper itself is a passionate argument to ignore and subjugate the collective intelligence of the free market in favor of polycentric authority which can manipulate the free market because they know better. That is the exact problem that blockchain is trying to solve. We are trying to build alternative finance and alternative governance so that polycentric authorities can’t manipulate the free market.

Yes, if Mina governance is not centralized and it’s not fully decentralized then some would call it polycentric governance.
But the goal of Mina governance must be full decentralization.
Fully decentralized trustless governance is the only governance we can trust.
If we can do it for ourselves then we have a better way to govern that we can market to the rest of the world.

Thank you again for taking comments.

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Hi @johnshearing

The source for Table 2 is our Next Steps blogpost that sets out our vision for decentralized governance in terms of Mina Protocol’s governance being effective and aligned. I’ll make the link clearer between decentralized governance and effective and aligned.

The Next Steps blogpost proposes that ‘to be effective and aligned, the Mina Protocol’s governance should possess the following attributes’ as set out in Table 2- like a checklist for achieving this vision for decentralized governance.

I appreciate that ‘decentralised’ is often not well defined; or at least is used in (slightly) different ways depending on the technological, economic or political context.

Table 2 provides a definition of ‘distributed’ in terms of power: ‘shares, rather than concentrates, power across participants, including the power to change the rules’. Do you disagree with this definition?

You say ‘a permissioned blockchain, for example, is distributed but it is not decentralized’.
How are you defining ‘distributed’?
And are you referring to ‘decentralized’ in a technological, economic or political sense?

You seem to define decentralized in terms of trust (‘decentralized governance is trustless governance’). This series of blogpost highlights the difference between governance by the network vs governance of the network. The former (implement and enforce the rules) is trustless but surely the latter (define the rules) still requires us to trust the groups and processes that have the power to define the protocol’s rules? If code is law, then who gets to write the law?

And it is this interplay of the groups and processes that polycentric governance illuminates so that we can check the power dynamics between them to ensure power is distributed rather than concentrated or even centralised.

The draft blogpost provides a definition of polycentric governance: ‘multiple decision making groups with overlapping areas of authority (‘groups’) interact through mutual coordination and negotiation (‘process’), resulting in a set of rules that they all follow (‘outcomes’)’. Does this not apply to crypto systems? After all, crypto systems are still socio-technical systems?

Looking forward to your response! :slightly_smiling_face:

Cheers

Ben

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Thank you @BenK for your excellent draft and for taking the time to respond to my comments.

I have no disagreement with your definition of “distributed”.
My comment was that “decentralized” is not listed as a goal of governance and that it should be.

Yes to all. That must be the goal.

When governance is decentralized, any community member can write the law and a decentralized voting process is required to ratify it.

I hope not. This is the very problem that the crypto was invented to solve.

I asked Claude.ai to explain the difference between polycentric governance and decentralized governance. The following was it’s answer:

Polycentric Governance:

  • Multiple independent decision-making centers
  • Centers have overlapping but distinct jurisdictions
  • Centers are interconnected and interdependent
  • Focuses on coordination between different centers
  • Allows for contextual, localized decision-making
  • Emphasizes negotiation and mutual adaptation
  • More about creating a complex, interactive governance ecosystem

Decentralized Governance:

  • Distributes decision-making power across participants
  • Flattens hierarchical structures
  • Aims to remove central authority entirely
  • Focuses on direct participation
  • Relies heavily on technological mechanisms (like blockchain)
  • Emphasizes equal participation and transparency
  • More about democratizing decision-making processes

Key Distinctions:

  1. Structural Approach
  • Polycentric: Multiple semi-autonomous centers
  • Decentralized: Flat, distributed power structure
  1. Coordination Mechanism
  • Polycentric: Negotiation and mutual adjustment
  • Decentralized: Consensus and direct voting
  1. Scope of Autonomy
  • Polycentric: Centers have defined but overlapping domains
  • Decentralized: More radically distributed decision-making
  1. Theoretical Origin
  • Polycentric: Emerged from institutional economics
  • Decentralized: Emerged from network theory and blockchain technologies

Most telling to me is the last item (4. Theoretical Origin)
Does our community want a governance that emerges from institutional economics or from blockchain technology?

The article from which your article draws inspiration was authored by a former member of the World Economic Forum. This is a cabal of unelected institutions and industries that sets policy for billions of humans. That is polycentric governance so of course that is what they are pushing.

I think most community members would agree:

  1. We do not want polycentric governance.
  2. Decentralized governance must be our goal.

Thank you again @BenK for the conversation.
Much of my own work on governance is deeply inspired by yours.
Thanks to the Mina community for creating this playground of ideas.

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Thanks @johnshearing for this specific feedback that I’ve now incorporated into the text. Stay tuned for the final version :slightly_smiling_face:

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