Conceptual questions

General
1

I am very excited about the existance of the Dfinity Foundation and spent a lot of time reading about ICs concepts. As a hobby programmer I will cerainly start learning Motoko as well and I am already a proud member of an 8 years locked neuron :grinning: I have 3 conceptual questions I would appreciate to get the team members thougts on:

  1. I understand that it is almost impossible for an individual to get 51% of the voting power. However how is the project “protected” against let’s say 5-10 huge parties playing together to get a majority? My concern is that in a few years maybe some big tech companies might be scared of ICs sucess and might want to “harm” it…

  2. In the neurons voting categories we find “Exchange price”: Does this mean that ICP exchange price is somehow “manipulated” or “regulated” by the protocol?

  3. I read that 90% of ICP should be staked. Is this enforced by the protocol or more a “whish” on how an ideal distribution of ICP should look like? May be enforcing it through the protocol might be my first proposal neuron :blush:

Would love to hear your thoughts…

Cheers,
Andi

2

Hey ajerni,

  1. this is a very unrealistic scenario. These big tech companies would have to buy that ICP on the market which contains far less then 51% of tokens. Even if it did buying that many tokens would massively drive up the price making it a massively costly operation. After having bought all these tokens for a gazillion dollars I don’t think the shareholders would be very happy if they immediatly burned the network to the ground.

  2. No these proposals track the changes in the ICP price they don’t manipulate it. This is done to keep the conversion cost between ICP and cycles stable at 1 SDR a stable basket of currencies from IMF https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/special-drawing-right . This means that the cost of computation stays stable on the IC

  3. This is more a wish that can be stimulated by setting the staking rewards higher. Enforcing it is probably not a good idea. That would mean that someone’s tokens that they payed for are suddenly locked without their consent. Be careful with making a proposal that might not get accepted there is a cost to making proposals to prevent spam.

2 Likes
3

Hey Fulco, thanks a lot for your explanations. One more question:

In the NNS app I read that it might result in loss of cycles while using it in beta.

Are the neurons secure? Will they be transferred to the final version after beta?

Thanks & Regards,
Andi

4

Hey ajerni

The network is not in beta currently it is live! where did you read this?

5

In the nns.ic0.app when trying to create a new canister it reads “Application subnets are in beta and therefore Cycels might be lost”. In addition the “Network deployment” tutorial on dfinity.org under Quick start has a big “Caution” note. And I understood that the mainnet well only be open to public once more subnets have been added. Any update on this?

6

From the Quick Start Tutorial on Network Deployment:
Capacity for the Internet Computer continues to expand through proposals to the Network Nervous System (NNS). At this time, subnet capacity is limited to systems canisters and applications that are approved by proposals submitted to the NNS. In the coming weeks, additional application subnets will be added through NNS proposals for general use by the developer community. In the meantime, we encourage you to develop and deploy projects locally. If you attempt to deploy before there are application subnets available, the operation will fail and result in a fractional unit (e8s) loss.

7

also https://dashboard.internetcomputer.org/ shows “Network Status: beta”