As has been pointed out already, I think banning the practice is difficult if not impossible since the same vote-trading actions can still be taken, in the shadows. Perhaps not as economically efficient, but it just means that power is further concentrated among a few well-connected individuals at the detriment of the general public. If vote-trading is happening, I would rather see it ‘democratically’ available to all, and for the practice to be publicly observable to all participants.
That being said, I think LobbyFi’s services provide one unfair advantage we normal users do not have, buying votes from LobbyFi (or by bribing any other user) is the only way for us to acquire more voting power for an on-going vote, as it is happening.
Due to the way snapshots work, each of us only have the amount of voting power available for a given vote that we possessed when the vote was initialized, at the time of the snapshot. None of us can go out and buy more ARB in the middle of a vote to acquire more..except by renting from LobbyFi (or similar service). I think this is an important power imbalance created here.
If we allow LobbyFi or similar services, should we not also allow users to add to their voting power through the other means the market provides? The service LobbyFi provides is roughly analogous to a temporary restricted loan of ARB, but LobbyFi is able to provide a feature-as-a-service (essentially through a technical loophole) that the voting system has fundamentally been designed to deny its users.
Whatever stance we take, in my mind we ought to be fully aligned in both aspects. We should either:
- Allow LobbyFi to do what they currently do, while also allowing every voter to freely accumulate more ARB during a vote through other means, should they so choose.
- Disallow LobbyFi and keep the current system, knowing full-well that shady backroom deals may still occur that achieve the same thing. Though to be fair, that kind of dealing surely still happens from time to time, even with LobbyFi.
(I recognize it’s not as easy as just “allowing users to accumulate more ARB during a vote”, preventing situations like passing around the same large chunk of ARB between several voters to temporarily inflate their voting power, etc, has to be accounted for on a technical level, but in my mind there’s no point in digging into implementation details before there’s alignment on whether it would even be the right philosophical approach)