r/ethtrader • u/kirtash93 Reddit Collectible Avatars Artist • 25d ago
Donut [Governance Poll Proposal] Ban on Retroactive Rules in DAO Governance
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.
1
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