Hacker News Reader

Comment by Djvacto | Hacker News Reader

So, would you mind helping me see if I understand quadratic voting correctly?

Let's say there are 4 voters: A, B, C, D, voting on policies 1-10. Everyone gets a certain number of votes (say one per policy, so 10 total).

Voter A only really cares about policy 5 & 7. So they want to buy votes for these 2. They can give up their votes in, say, policies 1-4 to get 2 more votes for policy 5, and can also give up votes 6, 8-10 to get 2 more votes for policy 7. So they put 8 votes into the "common pool" in order to ensure that, in addition to their vote for 5 & 7, each policy also gets 2 extra votes?

View on HN

That's basically it. So say you had 10 people on your team, each person gets 9 votes. Say someone wanted to give only one person all their votes, the recipient would accrue 3 votes (sqrt(9)=3). Or they could give 2 people 4 votes each which would accrue as 2 votes (sqrt(4)=2) each for those two people and then you'd have one left for someone else. Then you tally up all the accrued votes (not votes spent) for all the people and then you'd be able to rank people according to how helpful they are (but this ranking wouldn't be transferable outside your team; you can't use it to compare them with the helpfulness of people on other teams).

I was about to ask what happens to the 1 leftover vote, since it's not enough to give to anyone.

I now recall that sqrt(1) = 1. I did not recall that 2 minutes ago.

I think you just described a typical day in Congress...

In QV, you buy votes with money. You can buy as money votes as you want, but you have the pay v*v for it, where v is the number of votes.

> In QV, you buy votes with money.

FWIW, the paper describes it as a vote currency that can only be used for the vote, as opposed to cash you could spend on anything. The voice credits have to be distributed to voters.

'individuals pay for as many votes as they wish using a number of "voice credits" quadratic in the votes they buy.'

If you are referring to the same QV paper I read, it spends most of the paper arguing for money but then at the end suggest a virtual currency at the end for those who can't accept their argument for allowing buying votes with money.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com