Not to belabor the point, but @dfisher and @wpb describe the problem pretty well. It’s basically a lack of growth, which is allowing other arguably inferior chains to attract devs who should be migrating to the IC. To their problem statement I would add Dom’s recent revelation that IC Awareness stands at 0.5% in the industry. I could hardly believe that, and I think we have to acknowledge it as a very serious problem.
However, a lack of awareness of the IC is not really a problem the NNS can do anything about, except perhaps to authorize the Community Treasury to be created along the lines suggested. However, that will take time, and I think the only way it can possibly be justified would be if there were a powerful decentralized project evaluation system that the Community is convinced to be capable of reliably managing such a Treasury.
So we have our problem, and it is huge, and I’m proposing a solution, this Civol IC Projects system, and we will need to evaluate it to determine how solid a solution it actually is. And if we agree it is solid, then I think that motion proposal to create the Treasury might at that point be drafted and submitted to NNS for a vote.
That’s what I’m seeing, I hope it seems reasonable.
Isn’t bootstrapping / funding new projects what DFINITY GRANTS is doing currently ?
Is the treasury funding more money to already funded projects from DFINITY GRANTS? It make most sense to me that funded projects that needed more money to progress can get the additional push from treasury.
Or is it that the treasury is funding money to projects that has failed to get DFINITY GRANTS but the community really like the project idea so much that it can fund it ?
What I don’t want to see is developers requesting fund from the treasury to get funded instead of DFINITY GRANTS because it is EASIER to get or MORE FUNDING to get
BTW these are the 2 ideas that I strongly will agree to if ever a NNS treasury would be created.
While I voted in favor of creating an NNS Treasury, I wanted to reiterate here that I do not believe it should ever be directly supported by minting coins (for example, by diverting rewards from non-voting neurons). A treasury is a fine idea, but it should remain decoupled from the money printer that it also manages. This could take the form of funding from the Foundations, applying grants, receiving donations, etc.
The “problem” (as I see it) is that for a number of projects:
The grants program is not a good fit
no money up front
limited funding tiers
less confidence for recipients about runway
Traditional investors (angels, VCs) are not a good fit
See Jordan’s comments from above:
More generally, these also have processes that are decided by centralized entities and depend on a smaller number of people when compared to the broader community.
As for why people haven’t heard that more projects are in need of funding;
My experience is that asking people for money is already quite a humbling experience. I can only speculate that people who have tried and have not yet been successful are concerned with how that looks to other potential investors.
Recently I became aware of some projects that are in this situation and other people have independently had similar conversations with different teams.
Thank you Paul. I understand, and at a personal level I want to support projects like yours and others. I am not against the idea of us coming together to find ways to fund these groups.
The issue (as I see it) is that we have not stated who the intended recipients of these grants are. I have heard everything from public goods, to any project the community approves, all the way up to 4-5 brand new foundations.
Right now I fear that everyone sees an opportunity for money and the community (outside the forums) has no idea what problem is actually being addressed.
To put it simply, I think we skipped at least one big step in this process and that was getting NNS concurrence on the scope of the problem.
I’m confused by this statement and would appreciate if you will clarify. There is no such thing as diverting rewards from non voting neurons. Rewards are only offered for voting, so rewards don’t belong to a neuron if they don’t vote. Hence, they cannot be diverted.
If there is an inflation schedule we all know about since genesis that is designed to incentivize governance participation for the long term best interest of the IC, and it is not all allocated, then why wouldn’t it be good to use those funds to benefit the ecosystem?
I think you should have a voice in answering this question. I would be interested in knowing what you think.
I had a chance to meet Roald from Aviate Labs at the Code and State event in LA this week. @lastmjs and I thought he provided the most succinct answer we’ve heard yet. If DFINITY were gone, would the internet computer survive? If the answer is no, then the treasury should fund people and organizations that can contribute to the IC so the answer becomes yes. The treasury should fund decentralization and growth of the internet computer.
This reply is to let you know I’ve seen your question and I’m considering my response. It’s a good question and I have lots of thoughts that come to mind.
Since DFINITY has voted YES on this proposal (-> Internet Computer Network Status) when can we expect to know the motivations/reasoning behind that vote?
Thanks for linking that forum topic here @LightningLad91 . It’s easy for it to be forgotten since it had a lot fewer responses, but they were high quality discussion points. I agree they help explain the history of the treasury discussion.
After thinking on this for a while, my position is that we shouldn’t use the scenario you described as our problem statement unless we are prepared to address the problem holistically.
@weedpatch2 proposed a similar hypothetical scenario back in August and I think it’s worth talking about in a working group.
I still think it’s way too early for us to say that an NNS Treasury is the only solution we should consider.
Hi wpb! I meant that today, the voting rewards are X and they get divided among everyone who does vote. The proposal, as I understood it, wanted to scale X based on how many were actually voting, and then divert whatever X-V would have been to the Treasury. Hence, money that would go to me today as a “voting member in the presence of non-voting members”, would instead be redirected to the treasury. In other words, lack of voting by others would have no bearing any longer on the size of my own rewards.
Thanks @jwiegley. There may be confusion about this call to action forum topic. It isn’t a proposal to change tokenomics. Proposal 80790 was a change to tokenomics and was already deliberated and passed. This forum topic about an NNS treasury includes recognition of undistributed governance rewards resulting from proposal 80790 as a potential source of funding. We are not deliberating the tokenomics changes since they already passed.
I was interested in clarification on the idea that governance rewards might be diverted from non voting neurons. This isn’t possible. I wouldn’t want to divert rewards that are awarded to neurons. However, I don’t see anything wrong with using rewards that are undistributed. Undistributed governance rewards belong to no one yet they are part of an inflation schedule that is already understood by the community.
I’d like to self-promote Cosmicrafts Business Model here, which is based on bringing more users to the Internet Computer and get revenue from NFT trading royalties.
Cosmicrafts Proposal aligns with the Free-to-Use and Use-to-Earn model to facilitate user on-boarding, burns ICP/cycles, increase user database and invites them to participate on value projects like Social, Marketplaces, DeFi, Games and other Infrastructure, because the final goal to a thriving ecosystem is to reach Critical Mass.
Now, this Revenue Model doesn’t apply to all projects but it is a unique opportunity on the whole Crypto Space because of IC Reverse Gas Fees, which in my opinion it is one of the biggest advantages to open Web3 for more users.
@civolian, I’m quite new to this forum, and I just came across some of your posts in the past day. I took a look at the video demo of your product. However, I don’t understand how it is actually capturing evaluations of different alternatives, let alone aggregating those evaluations into a coherent social preference relation, which is what would be required for “direct democracy”.
It seems like there is only a 1-5 sentiment rating on expert video opinions about the vote, which is effectively a vote on the expert voters, rather than a direct vote on the alternatives the experts are presumably talking about. Although this could be great as an indirect form of liquid democracy to support some experts over others when one wants to follow the lead of experts, that appears to be more of a form of representative democracy rather than direct democracy. Are you planning to expand this platform to include direct evaluations by all participants on alternatives too (e.g., to decide how much scarce funding to allocate to a large number of project alternatives)? This is what would be required for the NNS to be used to fund growth when there are many projects competing for the same community / treasury funds.
People will to adopt your solution after they used to it. 
