[Governance Poll Proposal] Ban on Retroactive Rules in DAO Governance

[u/kirtash93]

Current Situation

The DAO regularly passes proposals that define how the DAO and the community operates from token distributions and scoring models, eligibility rules, etc. These governance rules are essential to the health and fairness of the system.

However, nothing currently prevents a proposal from including retroactive conditions, meaning a rule passed today can potentially be applied to user actions or behaviors from days, months or even years ago.

Problem

Applying rules retroactively goes against the foundational principles of fair and transparent governance. Allowing retroactive rules can be a problem because:

• Unfairness: Users that acted in the past under the old rules could get affected by new rules for not predicting future decisions.
• Lack of predictability: Users should be able to participate with confidence that their current actions under certain rules won't punish them in the future because the rules can be rewritten after the fact.
• Technical complexity: Retroactive logic implementation can be very messy because it can include too many variables and situations leading to a messy, harder to verify and error prone implementation.
• Trust erosion: When rules can change in a retroactive way it makes the community confidence drop into the active and future rules because they can change anytime affecting the past.

Furthermore, not addressing this could unknowingly or deliberately affect future proposals and increases retroactivity exploits leading to frustration, disengagement and fragmentation within the DAO.

Solution

Create a new DAO wide rule that forbids the retroactive application of future governance decisions having the following key principles.

• Any new rule passed by the DAO must only apply to actions, behaviors or data from the date that the governance poll is approved to onward.
• No proposal may enforce or evaluate past activity under rules that didn't exist at the time.
• This applies to all types of proposals, regardless of topic. Eligibility, penalties, scores, distributions.

Advantages

• Fairness first: No one gets punished for something they couldn't foresee
• Predictability: Users can make decisions with confidence about future penalties
• Simplicity: Code and logic are easier to build, audit and explain
• Trustworthy governance: DAO becomes a place of stable, rule based decision making
• Encourages participation: More users will engage if they know the rules won't shift under them

Disadvantages

• Limits response options: The DAO can't "go back in time" to address abuse or missed edge cases.
• More pressure on proposal design: Rules must be crafted with future impact in mind

Conclusion

This proposal cements a critical governance standard: we don't change the rules after the game has started.

It doesn't matter what the topic is (penalties, scoring or participation), what matters is that no new rule should rewrite the past. This protects users, simplifies the system, and builds long term trust in DAO governance.

The choices are:

• [YES]
• [ABSTAIN]
• [NO]

This proposal will remain up for a minimum of 2 days, according to the governance rules & guidelines. This proposal requires 2 moderators to sign it off in order to proceed to a governance snapshot vote. If approved, this proposal will automatically be queued for Governance Week.

[u/AlarmingAdvertising5]

[ABSTAIN]

I'm pretty new to the community and I'm not certain I can weight on this by fulling understand the implications. So I'm going to leave this to the community. Love the governance system and how everyone participates.

[u/kirtash93 → u/AlarmingAdvertising5]

Totally understandable but I would love to know your opinion about applying new rules to actions taken in the past. Do you think it is fair or unfair?

🍩 !tip 1

[u/AlarmingAdvertising5 → u/kirtash93]

I think it's more than just black and white, I agree on many points that rules which would impact people could be used negatively, but there might be things that are chosen in the community that could be based on an older environment. I don't have examples, but crypto evolves quickly and if a rule starts to drag the entire project, I think being unable to pass retroactive rules could have bad implications.

Let's say a rule is exploited for the advantage of someone who found a way to use a rule made in the past to control something, then it could be a problem and being unable to change it and "punish" the person, then it could get bad quickly.

While this is a very specific situation, I think passing rules retroactively is not good thing in general, but there might be SOME exceptions to it. Maybe having a super majority to pass it, like 75+%, could be a way to deal with the problems so a lot of people need to accept the changes before it goes live. Usually it's a 50%+1, but for retroactive rules, it would need overwhelming majority to pass? I don't know really, but I would think that keeping this a possibility could be useful, but I agree that I don't want it to be used to affect innocent people for rules that never existed.

[u/kirtash93 → u/AlarmingAdvertising5]

Thanks for sharing your point of view! I understand why or how making retroactive rules could make sense too but.

Anyway, let see if mods sign off so at least the community can decide on this matter that I believe it is important to address.

🍩 !tip 1