I’d be wary of manipulations aka spam new accounts to vote. This i why I would weigh balance in favor of age. For example, we could make multiple accounts right now (hundreds, programmaticaly) and wait for the voting that will be probably on a later date.
(Account weight) x (age) could be another option, but then we should vote on a fair ratio for that 
Yes but those hundred accounts would only be created today. Anyone with an account before today would have more weight. Not saying it’s perfect or should be used, but it’s an interesting idea.
And I personally don’t believe balance is a fair way to vote. It doesn’t capture the opinions of the community, it captures the opinions of those willing to vote that have the most NIM. New community member are at an immediate disadvantage, and regardless of how long they’ve been in the community, voting with balance favors the wealthy.
I like the idea of multiplying together, but as you mentioned it makes things, more complicated. Could be worth looking into, but even then it may not be the best solution.
At the end of the day though, it seems likely there won’t be a vote, just the AMA and then TN will make the decision.
I agree with not having NIM balance determine voting power. It is not a fair way to represent the collective will of a diverse community. This will be especially true after the switch to proof of stake model when a handful of early adopters will hold the vast majority of NIM. Some people simply don’t have the financial or material resources that others do, yet still might be contributing to the success of the project in other ways. They should have equal vote in my opinion.
If we were to explore voting based on the age of a wallet, I think choosing a cutoff that has already passed, like March 15th for example, would prevent somebody from artificially influencing a vote by creating a bunch of new wallets. Those that have only been in the community for a few weeks will miss out on voting, but that seems fair as they don’t have the same ties to the project that long-term community members do. The problem is that it is not a sustainable voting model in the long-term as anybody could create a bunch of accounts now to influence future votes, so it would have to be a one-time use model. That being said, I still think it could be an effective framework for this particular vote.
The issue of people not having access to older accounts is something I imagine is spread fairly evenly across the community, so although it will seem unfair to a given individual, it likely won’t affect the outcome of a vote by the whole group.
The problem that was mentioned before is that we can’t democratically choose the best way to vote without having a vote on it, which just creates a loop. So maybe it is best if TN chooses what they see as a fair framework for conducting a vote on the emission curve, and then have the community do a multiple rounds of voting to determine the path forward, based on the questions discussed above and any other details that need to be decided upon?
There are downsides to any voting models. When considering the options, I was thinking of attack vendors.
*With balance the voting weight is limited by the balance (6.48 bil for the moment of writing, including vesting accounts), but having multiple accounts doesn’t give you any extra weight.
*With account age the limit is the age (certain threshold). But having multiple accounts makes you scale your weight horizontally, where the limit is infinity.
Out of both options I found balance more secure in terms of bad actors. As I said before it IS skewed towards whales nevertheless. I liked the comment that community has collaterally a lot more NIM that team nimiq, making another good equalizer in terms of TN <> community.
The list of considerations for anything different from what’s already been used for the community representatives election is endless, it seems. For instance, if account longevity was to be taken into consideration for voting, what is going to stop people from “renting” their accounts to whales, since whales could transfer funds to the voter’s account before the election takes place.
This is why I initially suggested balances be ignored. If we just went with account age there would be no issue of a few whales having too much control. I’m not saying this is the best idea, nor am I married to it, but it is better than financial power = voting power in my opinion, which is too close to the corrupt way that things are already set up in the world.
@Rob I’m not sure what you mean by scaling weight horizontally to infinity, could you clarify?
With balances the individual power is limited by his max balance
With age, individual (attacker) is limited by how many accounts he can produce.
I mentioned above having a cutoff date that has already passed (March 15th in the example). That way nobody can gain an advantage by producing more accounts. It’s already too late.
I think with 2 cut off dates we could get a good system for counting age. One to prevent people from making a ton of accounts (the one Big_Mac is talking about), another to prevent unfairness with accounts that may or may not have been ditched during the switch to the new accounts (one that would be farther back than the one Big_Mac is discussing).
If we then multiply that clipped age by the balance we could get rid of the issue of people owning multiple older accounts (though now renting accounts is an issue but 
lol). Even if you have multiple accounts of a similar age, voting with all your balance in one such account vs voting with balance spread among them would be the same (if not detrimental since one account would be older than all the others).
Introducing balance into the equation brings back the issue of favoring those that hold the most NIM and are willing to reveal that balance, but it’s better than balance alone imo.
As long as we don’t know the date of voting (if any?) - I dont think its right to set a cutoff date.
By cutting off, say, 15 march means all newcomers aren’t allowed to have their opinion accounted for. What if the voting will be held in 1st june? Should we alienate all newcomers from march to june?
Those who hold a lot of nim should iheritantly be interested for the project to go in a sustainable and healthy way, otherwise their holding value is put at risk. Is it a bad thing?
Also, it was asked earlier - does voting have to be on-chain? If yes, does it have to be on NIM chain?
Also, a quick note. If the supply change would be done before POS rollout that means the reward/emission will affect miners. Since emission drops while costs (electricity) is same, potentially many miners might opt out, making a big hashrate drop & netowrk much less secure.
In my opinion, both early adopters and newcomers truly interested in supporting the project long-term should be holding the coin, which renders unnecessary the need to take into consideration account longevity, also if account longevity and balance were to be taken into account, also price should be considered. Let’s say a newcomer buys at once the same amount of coins than an early adopter, that not necessarily means that one of them is more interested in the project success than the other, and the price at which they cold have bought could have been different too. We don’t have to go down the rabbit hole since the price evolution and the market makes that the current balance reflects the level of commitment that a person has for the project. Also making any other kind of distinction favoring one group over those holding the coin defeats the purpose of supporting longterm the project by holding the coin. …I hope all that makes sense 
Good point on the cutoff date. We could do something relative to the vote date, but that would still allow for some people to create accounts early.
I’ve never agreed with the opinion that the more NIM one holds the more interested in the project having a healthy life they are. If anything given current crypto antics, some of the people with big bags are specifically waiting to make some big gain and then dump. Or worse, they’re using their big bags to trade the ups and downs which only makes the price more inconsistent.
Even if we assume all big holders are good actors, it still doesn’t mean they care more about the project’s future than a smaller holder. It heavily favors those with more NIM, which boils down to favoring the wealthy. So imo it’s a bad thing due to the fact that they don’t inherently have best interests in mind and the fact that they don’t inherently care more than smaller holders.
But your whole post is built on the fact that “balance reflects level of commitment” which I think is fundamentally wrong. As I described above, not all big holders have best interests in mind and even if they do, they aren’t inherently more committed / want a sustainable future than a small holder.
Also, I like you bringing back up the question of whether to vote on chain or not. And even then, which chain to use.
I still think using an ETH contract to store signed votes would make a lot of sense to tally votes, regardless of how they’re weighed. I would consider making such a system if it was wanted for this voting.
But with that said, imo there’s still the question of whether there will even be a vote.
Sounds to me like it’ll be AMA followed by Team Nimiq making some decision.
I see your point, but for that to happen the price would need to go up first, and that might be a mesure of success of the project. Account longevity doesn’t necessarily tell us either whether the account’s owner is waiting to make a big gain to then quit supporting the project.
Agreed that price would need to go up first for them to ditch their bags, but the fact that some might be waiting to do that means that they’re not inherently more interested in the projects success than those with less holdings.
And yes, account longevity doesn’t tell us whether they’re waiting to dump or not, but that’s not what were trying to find out. That was just an example of one of the many reasons “holding more” doesn’t inherently make you a bigger supporter than someone “holding less”.
What account longevity does is give us an idea of how long the voter has participated in the Nimiq ecosystem, regardless of how much they have. Now Rob’s idea of people loaning / renting their older accounts out would be a big issue, but all systems have flaws and imo multiplying account age by balance would reduce the incentive to buy an old account (not completely but it’d help manage the issue a bit and let balance still be a factor).
I think trying to use some parameters other than the current balance to draw a line between those voters that support the project and those that not is pointless without something like KYC, to avoid people voting multiple times, and long term HTLCs, which obviously reflects the long term commitment to the project, but I’m not sure whether supporters would want to go trough all that. The other option is just to asume that the current balance, given the market evolution, reflects the level of commitment to the project 
I see nothing wrong with a smidge of KYC. We could mess with signing message containing an account name (TG, Discord, Reddit, whatever) to prevent people voting multiple times. Maybe vote weight by number of accounts related to your address and some way to filter out fake accounts.
I’m confused by your last sentence. You’re saying to vote with price as it reflects commitment? Or are you saying stick to balance as it reflects commitment?
Either way I think it’s less about commitment and more about preventing manipulation. Some system that could accomplish this would be neat, but again I think we should discuss the fact that no vote may even be held the way things are looking.