quadratic voting

Quadratic voting is a scheme designed to measure how strongly people care, not just how rich they are. Each voter spends 'voice credits' on options, but the cost of votes grows quadratically: 1 vote costs 1 credit, 2 votes cost 4, 3 votes cost 9, n votes cost n-squared. Because the price of each additional vote keeps rising, a deep-pocketed whale can still buy more influence than a small voter, but only at a punishing, super-linear cost — so a hundred people who each care a little can outweigh one person who cares enormously and can afford to.

The mathematics make the influence you buy proportional to the square root of the credits you spend: spend 100 credits and you get 10 votes, spend 10,000 and you get only 100. That curvature is the whole point — it lets intensity of preference register (you can spend more to signal you really care) while sharply diminishing the marginal power of raw wealth. Quadratic funding, used by Gitcoin to allocate public-goods grants, applies the same square-root idea to match donations, so a project funded by many small givers receives a larger match than one funded by a single large giver.

Quadratic voting has one devastating prerequisite: Sybil resistance. The whole scheme assumes one person cannot cheaply split their stake across many identities — because if they can, they shatter their wealth into many cheap small votes and recover near-linear influence at a fraction of the quadratic cost. In a pseudonymous blockchain, creating fresh addresses is free, so quadratic voting is only safe with some proof of personhood or identity (such as Gitcoin Passport, BrightID, or World ID). Without it, quadratic voting is strictly easier to game than plain token weighting, not harder.