Likely jury stacking in case 546 & court jump impossible

General
#1

Hello,

I’m following English-Chinese translation case 546 [1] and I believe
the challenger is likely engaging in jury stacking.

My suspicion comes from the fact that that the English-Chinese subcourt had
not received any new stake for months (as far as I can tell) and suddenly
received 20,000 PNK of stake just one day before dispute 546 was created
(i.e. a day before the translation was challenged, see [7]). My suspicion
was further increased by the fact that the address having added that stake
[2] had not added any stake to Kleros in over 2 months ([3], [4]).
Furthermore, it just so conveniently happens that the amount of stake added
by [2] in [4] is just the right amount to grant them a total of >50% of the
subcourt’s stake (27,264 PNK vs 21,884 PNK; see [5]), or more precisely
55.5%.

All in all, it seems very likely to me this is a blatant case of jury
stacking on behalf of the requester and challenger (same address: [6]) and
the juror with address [2] (who I now believe to be either the same person
or their friend/coconspirator).

Now, all this wouldn’t be quite be so bad if not for one unfortunate fact:
the ‘jurorsForCourtJump’ parameter for subcourt 21 (English-Chinese, and I
believe this is the case for all translation subcourts) is set to 128, which
is to say that there can never realistically be a court jump. If this
parameter were reduced to something reasonable like 3 or 4, I could present
the evidence I have presented above to the higher court(s), and although
they will not be able to judge the quality of the translation, they would at
least be able to see that the court process itself was corrupted.

Now, I know that there is a governance process by which such parameters can
be changed, however I’m not sure what the conventions are regarding its use
and I believe it would take at least one week for the change to be applied.
Not to mention that when I experimented with changing the parameter in
governor.kleros.io, it requested a deposit of over 14ETH, a sum which I am
most definitely not willing to risk.

Of course, there is the possibility that this is all just a coincidence and
that I’m just being paranoid… Let’s hope that’s it but I’m not holding my
breath if the translator goes through with the appeal.

Here are some other issues I noticed while reading the Kleros and Linguo
contracts’ sources:

  1. There does not seem to be any limit to the number of appeals. This
    seems to me like a pretty big flaw since a rich participant could just
    appeal indefinitely until their probably-not-quite-as-rich adversary
    gives up or has no money left. I know that crowdfunding is an option but
    given a rich enough adversary, even crowdfunders might be too scared to
    participate. I therefore believe appeals should be limited in some way.

  2. Regarding the Linguo contracts, they currently have a governor which can
    change the appeal multiplier arbitrarily for any of the participants.
    This basically means that the arbitrator can prevent any participant of
    his choice from appealing altogether (by setting an absurdly high
    multiplier). In its current state these contracts are therefore no better
    than a centralized escrow. I would even argue that they are much worse
    since they have the complexity of the court system and the
    arbitrariness of a centralized escrow. I really think you should remove
    this central point of failure.

If anyone here knows how to help, I’d definitely be interested. At any rate,
I hope the Kleros community will at least consider changing the court jump
parameters, and perhaps limiting appeals and fixing the centralization in
the Linguo contracts.

[1] https://court.kleros.io/cases/546
[2] https://etherscan.io/address/0x9b70502efaaf3470f62ca3a27f7eab37942f4e80
[3] https://etherscan.io/tx/0xe6f41720b5b18bfafeb3db8b6bc51fe4425a10b9d8e59e5f2e4a6991f4296122
[4] https://etherscan.io/tx/0xe030fd539e2e929f86abedeae93413257822cce57e054c3bd7cf8d18882b17fe
[5] http://klerosboard.com/court/?id=21
[6] https://etherscan.io/address/0x5dCE0b2F2bc6a806AD1Ee43bCEe0EDd86877025C
[7] https://etherscan.io/tx/0x575a84f7013ec5375c8a4a474c1d30a8e8da9c7dff1e944ca118d6e0f7136f35

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Reduce jurorsForCourtJump parameter in translation courts
#2

(I can’t edit the original message so I’m updating with a reply:)
Upon further inspection, there does seem to be a (currently) 511+ juror limit in the general court so please disregard point 1. about appeal limits.

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#3

You don’t need to provide the deposit to execute proposals yourself. There has never been any case of proposal not executed because no one provided the deposit.

The limit is on the arbitrator side, you cannot appeal after there is more than 511 jurors (it asks an unpayable amount after that).

The governor will be moved to the Kleros Governor really soon.

If you strongly believe that someone is trying to make a bad ruling pass in Linguo, providing evidence and finding allies to crowdfund deposits in the appeal process is definitely the way to go. Maybe you want to link to the particular case and explain why you think the ruling is wrong.

#4

Thanks for the answers.

I’m afraid I don’t understand. When I go to governor.kleros.io and make a transaction list, the only option I see is to press the “Submit list with 14.505 ETH deposit” which opens a metamask popup asking me to do a transaction worth that amount. I don’t see any option to reduce the amount in either the governor’s web UI or the metamask popup. What am I missing?

Yep, I saw that after having posted :slight_smile:

Good to hear.

I guess we’ll wait and see how things turn out during the first appeal first. Do you know what the best places to find such allies would be, assuming I can convince anyone? The telegram channel maybe? The discord server seems pretty quiet.

As for a link to the case, I gave it in the OP (https://court.kleros.io/cases/546). The first round’s juror (which we do not know and have never communicated with) agreed with us in their ruling that the translation was acceptable.

#5

That there is a bunch of people interested in Kleros decisions being properly executed (myself included) and at least one of them will submit.

To create a proposal you need to make a forum and it will then be put to vote on snapshot. You do not need to pay any deposit.

This forum and juror heated chit chat would be good places.

#6

Thanks. I’ll make a proposal and look into the telegram channel.

#8

The governor has been moved to Kleros Governor.

#9

The majority juror ended up voting in favor of the translator and the appeal period is now over so it looks like my suspicions were probably unwarranted. Glad to have been wrong on this one :slight_smile:

It’s possible that the majority juror just got cold feet from the prospect of a long and incredibly expensive appeals process (perhaps from reading this thread or due to the fact that the appeal was crowdfunded from an unknown source) but if that were the case I believe there would have been a more profitable approach for a hypothetical conspiring juror to end the case: since on the second (and last) round he had two seats out of three, he could have voted in favor of the challenger and the challenger could have simply not funded the extra appeal. This would have had two advantages for the hypothetical conspirators over the current outcome:

  • The juror would have at least gotten the jury rewards since there is currently no feedback from the arbitrable contract to the arbitrator contract regarding the final outcome.
  • There is a chance that no one on the translator side would have dared to appeal further, in which case the hypothetical conspirators would have gotten everything.
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