Thanks for your patient explanations and your informative article. I do disagree with some of the points you made however…
On the contrary, I would find a sudden increase in jurors during appeal to be very suspicious and a possible indication of jury stacking. I feel that if people were qualified, they should have staked long before the case started, and one might even argue that the Kleros contract should assign a reduced weight to new jurors. Of course, this wouldn’t help for long-premeditated attacks, but it would perhaps help neutralize the most egregious attempts at jury stacking. And there’s also the issue of code complexity and therefore gas costs…
Anyway, I get your arguments but applying the principle that all jurors should have a high chance of getting picked at least once leads to (what is in my opinion) an absurdly prolonged appeal process in many cases. Take the French-English court for instance. It has one juror with an absolute majority (60000 vs 2000+1542+1000). Now, in order that all jurors would be likely to have a say (and that’s all it would be) (~79% for the 1000PNK staker), you would need jurorsForCourtJump=63 (total votes: 120), i.e. 6 rounds of Mr. 60000PNK winning over and over and over. And since we don’t know if the small value jurors are three distinct individuals or the same person with different addresses anyway, even if they all consistently voted against the 60000PNK staker, their plurality is not something that should be taken into account by the higher court anyway. Furthermore, if all you want is the opinion of the low-stakes jurors (and given how useless their votes are, that’s all you can hope to get anyway), surely they could provide a signed message with their opinion (although of course they have no financial incentive to do so).
There are however two kinds of evidence a higher court could still take into account:
- Expert testimony, where the higher court would have to evaluate whether the person having made the testimony is trustworthy.
- Evidence of subversion in the lower court (see my comments about case 546 [1] which I believe to be the target of jury stacking).
All this being said, I think we should be able to agree that the current court jump parameter (127) is too high for the translation courts in their current state (except perhaps for the Spanish one), but since I’m not sure exactly what would satisfy you or the community, could you make a proposal yourself?
[1] Likely jury stacking in case 546 & court jump impossible