D-QUORUM Stake & Disbursals

[Lorimer]

Thanks Lara, I really appreciate you taking the time to go through this

I think your two concerns are:

1. Unfamiliarity (no obvious precedent or analogy)
2. Incidental complexity

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TDLR: I’ve tried to summarise my answer for this below, followed by discussion points.

1. Familiarity: Representative democracy (in the form of periodic public elections) is a known and common governance process.
2. Simplicity: D-QUORUM is just the implementation detail, one which is intended to re-use existing governance infrastructure as much as feasible in a bid to avoid incidental complexity

These, in a nutshell, are the core intentions for D-QUORUM, as a means of combating the weaknesses of liquid democracy (particularly if followee-cascade-rewards are implemented).

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@lara

Maybe a good analogy to a known governance process might help future readers understand this aspect better?

Thanks, I should have done a better job of leading with the the intended behavioural features in my earlier explanation - specifically representative democracy, in the form of periodic public elections. This is the known governance process, while the D-QUORUM neuron itself is just an implementation detail (the design reasoning for which relates to your point about incidental complexity).

@lara

I now also see that the D-QUORUM idea could be an interesting experiment to try out a governance form that is closer to representative democracy - neurons vote once in a while which known neurons (representatives) are trusted to then make the decisions for a while.

I’m really glad you’re receptive! I hope your first point above is addressed, but please let me know if I need to dig a little deeper on that point. I’ll try to address your point about complexity below, preceded by the core design intentions.

Core Design Intentions

• Elections should be open, visible, and accessible to all, to avoid potential for centralised bias, censorship and/or hijacking
• Followers should retain freedom, by either delegating their VP to elected reviewers, or exercising unique followee preferences topic by topic if desired
• The easy option for followers should aid decentralisation rather than centralisation (conveniently following the elected reviewers, rather than ‘DFINITY Foundation’ being the obvious go-to)
  • Caveat: For this to be comprehensive and realistic, I think DFINITY should be considered an implicitly elected entity, unless that’s against the explicit will of the NNS on a topic-by-topic basis (otherwise the elected group as a whole will never be seen as a more natural choice to follow by the average disinterested follower than the ‘DFINITY Foundation’ neuron itself)
• Re-use existing infrastructure to avoid incidental complexity

Implementation FAQs (assuming periodic NNS elections)

• Q: How should followers delegate their vote to the elected group, without introducing incidental complexity?
  • A: Follow a neuron that is known to represent the elected group
• Q: How should elected reviewers be stored and represented by the NNS, without introducing incidental complexity?
  • A: Elected reviewers are stored as followees of said neuron
• Q: How should elected reviewers be rewarded for their efforts
  • A: The same way that the NNS already does this - maturity of a voting neuron with sufficient stake - in this case said neuron
• Q: How should those rewards be disbursed to elected reviews
  • A: By the NNS governance canister being the controller of said neuron () and periodically disbursing the maturity to the elected followees (). This shouldn’t really even need a proposal if the followees can be controlled by NNS proposal (which is necessary for on-chain elections in any case). This is really the only thing that needs implementing, and it should be minimal effort based on my understanding of the codebase. There’s a lot of pre-existing logic that can be reused due to this implementation being based on existing neuron infrastructure - very little actually needs writing.
• Q: Can you think of a simpler way of implementing NNS reviewer elections?
  • A: ________ (I can’t)
• Q: Is this approach compatible with follower-based reward cascades?
  • A: Yes, very much so

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@lara

Perhaps one could use a custom canister that controls the neuron and encodes some rules when and why the neuron’s maturity etc can be disbursed? Happy to help brainstorming more ideas!

I think you’re describing the CO.DELTA neuron and canisters. If DFINITY doesn’t want third parties building infrastructure to try and accumulate and direct funds towards NNS-elected reviewers as a whole, I’ll focus these efforts directly on CO.DELTA. This will benefit me more, along with the current and future CO.DELTA team. Hopefully it’s clear that that’s not actually what I’m trying to do.

Please let me explain why:

I see governance as the IC’s biggest achilles heel due to diffusion of responsibility. I’m pessimistic about its chances for long-term success unless there are a plethora of teams like CO.DELTA, where each one is well-funded but where the funds are conditional on the teams remaining sharp and competitive. This will not be achieved by a member of CO.DELTA building products that only fund CO.DELTA, because as soon as that funding stream exists, the immediate imperative for the CO.DELTA team to work hard on reviewing NNS proposals to earn said funds no longer exists…