failure family

plutocratic capture

38 claims across 22 works.

• timing mismatch between information and enactment: Because rulemaking is subject to regulatory cycles and to a classic collective action problem, rules are generally not enacted at the moment appropria
• buy vote and dump arbitrage: The author concedes an arbitrage attack is feasible when experts fail to police their expertise and a significant share of the technically fungible to
• bench capture by prior engagement: When the bench of arbiters is small, a powerful private user can capture it in advance by spending heavily to engage the bench through separate contra
• priceable-corruption-cost: Because almost all other blockchains distribute perfectly fungible currency tokens through initial sales or mining, there is a clear, computable answe
• whale-mediated-governance: Any blockchain whose soft forks are decided through private communication between famous token holding whales is ultimately less secure than legacy ce
• delegate-vote-buying: In delegated proof of stake protocols the significant block validation power of elected nodes leads to corruption, because those nodes are incentivize
• token-fragmentation: The cryptocurrency market structure is fundamentally convoluted because each project requires its own volatile token, which is equivalent to forcing g
• corruption through vote delegation: Vote delegation inevitably reintroduces corruption into a microdemocratic system, because representatives may seek to bribe or purchase votes to gain
• Fungible governance capture: When fungible assets are the dominant incentive design in the governance of a DAO with identifiable actors, rational and opportunistic internal and ex
• Token plutocracy: Suboptimal voting outcomes in existing decentralized protocols trace to one token one vote mechanisms, which allocate more power to holders of a signi
• local elite capture: Government decentralization at the local level can favor local elites and may overcomplicate the coordination of national policies.
• Fungible Asset Governance Corruption: When fungible assets are the dominant incentive design in the governance of DAOs with identifiable actors, rational and opportunistic internal and ext
• One Token One Vote Plutocracy: One token one vote on chain governance produces plutocracy: it allocates more power to holders of a significant share of supply so that majority token
• default oligarchy: Declining to adopt explicit or formal rules is itself a governance choice, and it defaults to rule by might; since might in these systems is defined b
• governance arbitrage through purchasable voting power: Because voting power in the 2016 DAO could be purchased, the exact cost of destroying it was calculable, and had it lasted longer than a month someone
• Polarizing outcomes of one token one vote: Reputation staking overcomes the polarizing effects and suboptimal vote outcomes produced by one token one vote voting mechanisms.
• Majority rule minority discrimination: Majority rule in microdemocratic systems can produce discrimination against minorities, because a majority that is itself unaffected by a rule it inst
• Majority power capture: Concentration of power is the greatest threat to any decentralized organization, because a single member or sub-coalition that gains a majority of pow
• Whale capture through purchasable voting power: Governance by fungible tokens lets whales control a fundraiser DAO, which is antithetical to decentralized governance, and selling purchasable voting
• External governance takeover: Insider rug pulls are not the only exploit path: a DAO can also be attacked from the outside whenever its governance grants voting power through fungi
• Minority stakeholder governance capture: Governance in most DAOs is severely underdeveloped, which leaves a minority of stakeholders defining governance, and that minority control in turn pro
• One token one vote proportional control: Braintrust demonstrates that innovation in work structure does not cure governance design: despite redefining work outcomes, it uses a suboptimal one
• Cheap small cap launch capture: Small market cap launches at very cheap initial prices carry the potential for team and whale purchase abuses, which is why equitable treatment of the
• Purchasable governance rights: DAO governance built on fungible governance tokens is disfavored and dangerous because governance rights can be bought on open exchanges, whereas non-
• Early whale supply capture: Whale purchases that soak up token supply at the earliest possible time in a launch are the key problem fair launch platforms address, because they ca
• passive-purchasable-ownership: Meaningful accessibility in a DAO is impossible if voting rights and ownership are merely passive purchasable assets, no different from traditional st
• whale-attack: VitaDAO's one token one vote structure leaves it susceptible to the 51 percent or whale attack, a vulnerability made worse because the VITA token is p
• founder-token-concentration: Allocating twenty percent of total token supply to the four person founding team, as Angel Protocol does, means the organization can never become full
• token-weighted-juror-capture: Kleros has weak attack resistance because juror selection is proportional to staked fungible tokens; staking reputation rather than tokens to select j
• tiered-voting-disenfranchisement: When only a minority of members, such as Audius node operators, can stake or earn weighted votes, the majority of token holders occupy the same powerl
• stake weighted governance capture: Proof of Stake consensus centralizes control in proportion to the quantity of tokens held, so governance built on such chains is skewed in favor of th
• pay to vote centralization and attack exposure: Requiring users to purchase governance tokens in order to vote both centralizes power in majority token holders and leaves the DAO highly vulnerable t
• token gated membership tiers: Tiered membership models that tie governance rights and influence to token holdings introduce imbalance and a centralization element into DAO governan
• Undemocratic Foundation Power Structure: Impact 1.0 foundations developed plutocratic power structures because their leaders and trustees were never democratically elected, and Impact 3.0 add
• Unchecked Individual Donor Agenda: Because Impact 1.0 entrusted individual donors rather than donor collectives with identifying which problems to solve, individual philanthropists can
• Priority Hijacking by Large Donors: The absence of an efficient marketplace lets big dollar donors hijack the priorities of impact intermediaries such as foundations, donor advised funds
• non-meritocratic-authority-allocation: Every existing legal order allocates amendment authority by territory, wealth, appointment, or historical accident, and none allocates it exclusively
• Token-Plutocracy Default: Token-plutocracy is the default governance form: across all forty DAOs governance is fundamentally token-weighted, even the strongest formal processes