Assessing governance & voting enhancements

This is a fair point and we should have identified and raised this point earlier. Going forward, I hope that the above goals will facilitate the discussion and I will act as an entry point from the side of DFINITY.

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I think periodic confirmation of followees is a useful building block to improve governance. And yes, given the identified issue, we should analyze and discuss how this issue can be addressed, also in conjunctions with other ideas discussed in the forums.

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Thank you @wpb, I agree that education can and should be a part of the effort to enhance & improve governance. However, I think we should aim for having a solid majority for urgent updates, so that we can reach a conclusion quickly on urgent subnet updates in a variety of circumstances (just about 50% might be a bit tight).

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Yes, this is a very good question! I also started to think about active voting power which might be a useful enhancement for the periodic followee confirmation. One drawback that I see: Active voting power is currently around 195mn, out which 90mn is DFINITY. So introducing active voting power now (say for all categories) would give DFINITY close to 50% (of the active voting power). So we would need to see how to encourage and increase active voting beforehand.

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Hi @bjoernek and @lara,

Thanks for putting these thoughts down and sharing with the community. I really appreciate the gift that is a mental framework for evaluating new ideas and proposals. I agree with the 9 design objectives, with the very minor caveat that Efficiency should also include the ease of deployment (ie, is the change easy to program and test).

I also agree with your evaluation of Periodic Confirmation of Followees. I’ll add that the affect on the design objective of Reactive will decrease over time as voting power skews towards active participants from the natural course of staking. This is caused by two trends: new stakers on the NNS tend to be voting participants and neurons dissolving to less than 6-months tend to be skewed towards non-voting participants. It could be that over the next few months a stronger absolute majority of participants is formed.

In terms of prioritization, I fully agree with prioritizing the SNS development and deployment over measures to reduce spam. I also invite the community to think of ways in which we can reduce the spam in the meantime while also: 1) not diverting resources from SNS development, 2) skewing rewards back towards non-active participants (this is said not out of greed or fairness, but rather because I’m highly doubtful that any such proposal would pass) and 3) is acceptable given the 9 design objectives above.

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Thanks for the feedback @Kyle_Langham !
Adding ease of deployment to the efficiency goal makes sense and this is now included in the post. I also did some small alignments for consistency on this category which is now called Efficient & scalable throughout the text (in the original version I had sometimes “Efficient” and sometimes “Efficient & scalable”).

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The following vote as I understand it was placed within the system by Dfinity and I don’t see too many problems with it.

What I read is that it is the active not the inactive that are creating problems by looking through the code and seeing how and to do spamming. Yet I see more about how to make the inactive pay the price.

Please understand that I love to see solutions and the forum trying to do something to fix the active problems but I have to give my opposite view.

It seems to me that we should stop the spammers and their behavior.

As I understand the spamming problem
There are neuron owners that have large quantities of coins but more importantly receive many more rewards than most for voting.

A demonstration I saw was about 2 examples that referred to 1 holder having 60,000 icp while the other had 32,000 icp.

So I believe, while we can follow and receive rewards from following and there seems to be much to vote on each day that some feel they can earn more rewards by putting up bogus proposals to earn further rewards.

I see it was proposed to raise the cost per proposals for failure around a model of coins equal for all holders that put forward a proposal.

I believe the 2 examples of the holders above would receive 100s of icp a year while I will receive 10s of icp a year for the same voting.while the cost of a proposal is the same for all.

This could make it costly for myself but for those with larger amounts of coins would still feel this is not expensive for them and may continue to spam.

If you were to change this to a percentage of your whole stake then this would make it more equal. The only ones that would complain are those spamming.

We would then find those same clever people, retain their advantage by setting up smaller neurons for a proposal and for that I would think that we could calculate the percentage on the anchor to include all neurons.

But then I have never put forward a proposal and I am not sure of the process other than seeing what I feel is a proposal for spammers that are laughing at us right now and myself the follower feeling bad about myself.

Maybe I don’t understand the issue correctly and maybe I will see my stupidity at a later time but at this time you must forgive me for feeling the need to voice my opinion.

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Here are a few things to consider to address this issue:
1 - I think active voting power will quickly reach into the 75+% level very soon after periodic Followee confirmation is implemented. Hence, this concern will likely be resolved naturally.
2 - Dfinity holds voting power in many neurons according to @diegop. If you find that you have too much voting power compared to the rest of the NNS, then you can choose to not vote with some of the neurons.
3 - To be honest, I would rather start with Dfinity having too much voting power in the very beginning than to continue with the voting participation imbalance that is currently caused by default following on All Topics. I think this is a minor issue and would be glad for Dfinity to have too much voting power if active voting power is adopted as the reference point for voter participation. I like this enhancement a lot.
4 - There is always the option of setting up some of the Dfinity neurons to follow other public known neurons in order to ensure that the Dfinity neurons are maximizing voting rewards during a transition to increased voter participation. Since Dfinity owns their voting power, they can choose to follow any other neuron for any reason they want just like everyone else. You could even use this as an incentive for new public neurons to surface by giving them a voice.

Those were just several ideas that come to mind to address the concern. However, I’m not really that concerned. I think the issue will quickly go away on it’s own.

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As I understand voting: If you have a stake under 6 months then you get no rewards but I not so sure of that. I signed into the NNS and was getting familiar with the information. I filtered proposals that were rejected and started viewing these and I assume they are the spam that is mentioned.

Each one I went through I noted that the information displayed: dissolve delay < 6 months and 1 with created after proposal.

This was displayed within the Ineligible Neurons information:
The following neurons had a dissolve delay of less than 6 months at the time the proposal was submitted, or were created after the proposal was submitted, and therefore are not eligible to vote on it:

But I can also see that these proposal where voted on by the adopt or reject numbers.

Too many thoughts and question are going through my head so I would rather some one tell me that ineligible persons are not getting to create proposal and get rewards.

Did my last comment make this discussion redundant?

Short summary: To drive forward the discussion on how we can improve governance, especially to prevent spam proposals, we propose how new design proposals can be evaluated. We provide a first evaluation of some of the designs proposed in the forum, and we propose a roadmap on how to proceed with this discussion.

If those who have less than 6 months can’t make proposals then half or most of the spam is gone and continuity picking on the inactive followers to remove them from receiving rewards is self governance for your personal gain. Do the inactive know how you speak about them like this and are they aware this forum exists and want their participation?

I love the default setting that Dfinity set, shows a set of values and good leadership but the rot I see coming into this system is the greed and selfishness from within and not just from the spammers.

Hi @kvic
To make sure that I understand your thought process and idea:

  • You observed that the neurons which are making spam proposals have typically a dissolve delay smaller than 6 months.
  • Hence you propose that only neurons with dissolve delay bigger than 6 months should be able to submit proposals.

Is this a fair summary? From my perspective such a rule would not create a real hurdle to spammers. He/she could simple use one neuron with dissolve delay greater than 6 months which is easy to set up.

To make it slightly more precise: If the dissolve delay of your neuron is below 6 months, then your voting power and allocation of voting rewards is zero.

Your interest in my mindset is interesting when I feel I have observed a pattern about a problem with spammers that is the concern of this discussion.

I feel that the pattern observed is the mindset of the problem that you are referring to. That spammers can purchase or set up a neuron with 1 icp and then cause all the spamming they like with little risk. That all the observed spam proposals had the same pattern of being under the 6 month period. Your issue seems to be with me and not seeing my observation.

I am not trying to be fair, if you want to behave improper then I will provide my point of view but I see again you are protecting the improper and that I am unfair.

You are right, I want those too gutless to invest into the nns for greater than 6 months that have not risked their investment for better not to have a say in the nns but you would prefer to protect them and ridiculed me as having the wrong mindset.

I wonder about your mindset.

I wonder if the spammers mindset is that if a vote is designed to un-reward those neurons that spam they will lose very little but you prefer they stay.

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  • Proposer: The ID of the neuron that submitted the proposal. When a proposal is submitted, a “charge” is placed on its balance in case it is rejected. So the balance needs to be big enough to pay the charge on (all) rejection(s). We require a neuron to have a dissolve delay ≥ 6 months to vote, and this applies to submitting proposals too.

The according assessment is posted here.

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Please find the assessment here.

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Hi all,

I would like to give you a short update on discussions within DFINITY on the topic of spam prevention:

In my analysis, I initially focused on solutions which significantly reduce or completely remove the created financial incentive to submit spam proposals as first step. After further syndication, it became clear that there is a desire to come up with a more holistic solution if possible.

I will now continue to look into this (with limited capacity as a side project) and will come back once I have further thoughts and suggestions.

So for the time being this a non-conclusive update, but I thought it might be still useful for you to know.

Have a great weekend

Björn

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I have mentioned this before but I have notice a pattern within the NNS voting tab where the spam has the same Proposer ID which I assume is a unique number given to a Neuron which displays the same information of a lock neuron for: 5 years, 192 days - Dissolve Delay, the only thing that changes is the voting power which is because of the rewards paid to themselves for the spam they have created.

6.3-test Proposer: 16392997059792243989
6.2-test Proposer: 16392997059792243989
6.1-test Proposer: 16392997059792243989
5.31-test Proposer: 16392997059792243989

Which at the moment is 14 proposals inline of the above. I only printed those 4 but the same Proposer ID is used.

In my mind if, that proposer is a known spammer then I can think of many ways to have a holistic approach to fixing this problem but maybe I misunderstood this.

Creating new neurons is very simple, I suggest that DFINITY should freeze all my ICPs and cooperate with governments to KYC neurons
Internet Computer Network Status

sorry I am busy voting on 6.4-test