Treasury wallet and protocol upgrades are governed through voting with locked miners. Other parameters such as roll-over bonuses, reward boost threshold&events(inflation regulation), token burns, pool allocations... are regulated through voting with tokens. A bidding system that integrates you as a decentralized oracle by voting&sacrificing your XPD tokens. Just like blockchain transactions are slower and more expensive compared to a centralized database, the decentralized governance also comes with a price. It is not unreasonable(but it is optional) to put a portion of your earnings back for the sake of improving the protocol.

You can redeem a portion of your active miner into voting credit. Additionally you can harvest minerd NFT earnings into voting credit and you can also deposit from your wallet. In case you have no voting credit and you decide to vote, the balance will be taken from your wallet.
Keep in mind that voting credit deposits are non-refundable(you can not turn voting credit back into tokens). The deposited tokens are sent to the governing contract.