Change Vote to "No With Veto" on Juno Prop 16

Polkachu Team | 2022-03-14

Over the past two days, we have heard from the Whale with two long statements. In these two statements, the most damning is the private chat between Wolfcontract (Juno Core-1 member) and the Whale, and the most intriguing are the alternative proposals to resolve the issue. Both are worth a thorough reading.

Statement 1: https://medium.com/@WhaleJuno/our-statement-on-juno-prop-16-5a06b26e6cff

Statement 2: https://medium.com/@WhaleJuno/background-and-the-second-statement-about-prop16-c0bee3aaf772

Just in the past hour, we have heard from Juno's Core-1 team asking the community to down-vote Prop 16. We concur.

We believe in "strong opinion, weakly held." We voted "Yes" in our initial vote and re-affirmed the "Yes" vote with a blog post to support our vote. However, we are open to this new information. Given the new revelations and the changed position from Core-1 team, we have changed our vote from "Yes" to "No With Veto."

Our conclusions are below:

1. Airdropped Juno do not belong to the Whale: The Juno community believes that the airdropped Juno do not belong to the Whale. This led to Prop 16. The Whale concurs with this position explicitly in its second statement.
2. The Whale is not politically hostile to the community: The Whale is not a politically hostile party to the Juno community. Rather, it is just an economically selfish entity with deeply questionable practices. This is supported by the sincerity in its private chat with Wolfcontract, its position to "Abstain" in both Prop 4 and Prop 16, and its insistence to not unbond staked Juno. As long as the Whale does not unbond its stake and gives the community time to work out a solution, we do not regard the Whale as politically hostile.
3. There are other ways to resolve this issue: The Whale has proposed several counter proposals. We find these proposals are workable in principle. We wish that these options had been discussed behind the scenes, especially given that Wolfcontact and the Whale had a backchannel to communicate long before the Juno Stakedrop and long after the defeat of Prop 4.
4. Prop 16 was made in bad faith: The latest doxxing of Wolfcontract's private chat with the Whale portrays the picture of a savvy politician who leveraged the Whale's holdings for the political position he favored and then tried to wash it off. Wolfcontract was not transparent about this previous relationship, and has made no attempt to respond after the Whale's revelations.
5. Most votes on Prop 16 have been cast without the current full information: We are deeply troubled by the fact that a substantial amount of relevant information was not disclosed until the Whale's two statements and the Core-1 team's changed position towards the end of the voting period. A healthy democratic process requires a healthy debate grounded on information from both sides. We now believe that many votes were cast with only a partial picture of the relevant information. This violates a core tenet of a democratic process.

In conclusion, we believe that Prop 16 needs to fail. It was made in bad faith, it did not consider alternative solutions, and many votes were cast with an incomplete picture of the situation. Therefore, we change our vote to "No With Veto."

P.S.: We still believe that our "Yes" blog post is an intellectually articulate piece in support of the "Yes" vote. We believe it is much better than most pitchfork-like discourses in support of "Yes" that we often get on Twitter, Reddit and Discord. We will leave it up with a disclaimer on top.