And this is why he is proposing to give the NNS control of the faucet.
I do generally agree with the premise of your arguments though.
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I think you’re discounting the major issues there are with a system where there aren’t incentives for reviewing proposals. Tried that - it hasn’t worked…
Indeed. At the moment elections have been motion proposal based. D-QUORUM’s VP on any election should not be counted. I think longer term it would be nice for there to be a dedicated election topic, which requires manual voting (a topic where following isn’t possible).
In anycase, I think these sorts of concerns are for down the road. We need to remember where we currently are in this respect (and how centralised VP currently is, due to who people choose to follow because there aren’t really obvious better options).
Do we think it hasn’t worked because people don’t want to do it or because people don’t want do it because their financial lives depend on it. The second would be preferred and, unfortunately I’m afraid it is a flaw with the system. (Some) other blockchains have no issue with good governance because the incentives are aligned.
Bitcoin: agree on the longest chain or lose your rewards.
ETH: execute a round correctly when it is your turn or you get slashed.
Us: Develop expertise, do due diligence, and vote on this thing that you are going to get outvoted on.
Until you fix that any encouragement to the contrary is burning cash and building fragility. Yes it is a chicken and egg thing, but we’re currently a chicken and we need an egg. Bluntly, we’d be better off paying people to change their following than to pay people to review proposals. If we all woke up tomorrow and it was possible for an attacker to actively reshape the node provider configuration, enough of us would get good enough at reviewing the proposal that you would not have an issue anymore.(Note: I’m not making a judgement as to whether we’re at a place to do that or not.)
I think there was a proposal at one point to reduce rewards if the neuron you followed accumulated over a certain voting threshold(maybe I did this? Or I read it from someone else?). I think it was ignored for the simpler confirmation of neurons. That is a stick and I prefer carrots, but something like that will ultimately be necessary to reach sufficient decentralization so that quality, organic review emerges. (Doesn’t mean it will be perfect…probably robust). This also ignores the much deeper issue that there is very little at stake for node providers currently, it appears to be all upside. This is great for attracting node providers but not great for providing quality, involved, diligent node providers that self fund diligence. I’d just be cautious about trying to put a bandaid on something festering.
Having NNS oversight is generally a good direction:rocket:, but if it requires changes to the system I think you are in for a long, tenuous, frustrating battle. 
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Lorimer I just realised I can just bribe people,. They’ll vote with us if we give the money!
I’m sorry, but I’m not convinced you really understand what you’re saying. If you follow your reasoning through, you’ll realise it makes very little sense
that is what the bad guys do, we are better than that!
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Lol, please don’t let Austin (@skilesare) put you off (there’s little coherency to his arguments)
autisn? who is that I dont know that person
That’s very generous. Glad to see it to be honest.
Now Alex only needs to raise 790,000 ICP more via his new defi products in order to self support the existing grants program.
That’s probably true actually. Just offer them 1% of your own rewards proportional to the voting power they contribute and you will immediately give them a higher APY than staking alone. Of course they would need to make their neurons public so you can verify their vote on every proposal and you would need some sort of registration so you can know the account for their deposit (unless they are willing to accept a top up). It would be sad to see this happen, but it would probably work.
I am not connected with any VC firms in the US or anywhere else in the world.
If something doesn’t make sense I’m happy to clarify. I think my logic is sound and drawn from pretty empirical evidence of how governance has become corrupted throughout history. I could certainly be wrong.
What about my statement tweaked this sentiment? 1. I’m not talking about voting, I’m talking about following(which yes does lead to votes, but my argument is that votes don’t mean much if you know one entity sways the whole thing…which I’m personally fine with for now as there is still a ton of the IC to build…I just do not like seeing effort spent when there are better alternatives.) 2. I never mentioned bribes. We already pay people to vote through maturity. We don’t call those bribes do we? Some have called for diverting some of that maturity to known neurons. Some call that “confiscation.” I think tweaking the dials is fine if done intentionally and intelligently but I’m still against “pay for governance” because I think it breeds a brittle system. I admire Lorimer trying to accomplish it without “confiscation” but that doesn’t change that it may lead to brittleness. Telling people that they need to follow someone with less than 10% voting power to get full rewards is a dial, not a bribe. It puts an equally applied rule in place and leaves the choice in their hands which is why I thought we were all(mostly) here for this crypto thing.
I’m not saying we SHOULD do that right now, only that I think it might be more productive than other alternatives when we think the network is ready for full decentralization. Personally, I don’t want Dfinity impeded from accomplishing their work at this point so I’m generally fine with the status quo. I certainly have some nits to pick, but they are minor compared to finishing the vision. I know you like to troll and that you don’t like walls of text. I apologize if I chewed up too much of your Saturday. If you fund the thing I’ll even help with building components for it because I want to help initiatives on the platform and often we learn from things like this and can adapt. But should I not speak up? I mean wasn’t the time to speak up about the neuron fund needing an overhaul in June of 2023 or earlier? Like maybe you can see these things coming from two years away if you think a bit. Possibly.
Is it not possible to all work together toward the best solution rather than throwing rocks at people who see things from a different angle?
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Okay, other than DFINITY, who would you recommend following on IC OS elections proposals? How about Subnet Management proposals?
How do you think we get to that stage without incentivising members of the community to skill up on reviewing proposals while also increasing competition in that space?
It’s not that simple. We need both, i.e. the short-term / operational incentives to put the work in, and the long-term overarching incentive to protect the network and staked ICP. This is the same conversation that’s currently happening with respect to Node Providers (which, by the way, stemmed from proposal reviews which were funded by the Grants for Voting Neurons program).
In the future, when this space is more competitive, I fully expect that ‘putting the work in’ will not simply be enough to be successfully elected for such things. Neurons with a very large stake and who commit to publicly/verifiably reviewing proposals before they vote will probably (and necessarily) become a new, better benchmark.
We need to stimulate competition to get there though. In the meantime reviewers who consistently go above and beyond may even be offered opportunities to increase their stake in the network by those who appreciate their efforts and would like them to continue in the future. This sort of thing is already happening, thanks to @borovan and @Thyassa 
At the moment, everyone is rewarded for voting, but without the Grants for Voting Neurons initiative practically nobody would be reviewing proposals (despite what’s at stake). You need both the long-term incentives and the short-term incentives, or the system inevitably falls foul of:
Maybe the best form of web3 governance is no governance / low governance. But some people have other priorities. Conflict of interests etc etc. Anyways nice meme @skilesare
Perhaps I’ve made my point poorly.
I’ll try again, but perhaps it’s unproductive.
The point is that I would recommend no one. There is no reason. Let’s define two things, natural incentives and artificial incentives. In both instances there is a goal of the incentive.
Natural incentives are those that arise out of the structure of a system. The system is designed so that people with resources leverage those resources without coercion from out side the system. The system provides natural coercion.
Artificial incentives have to be incentivized from something out side the system. Typically this is done by proactively going out to raise the money or by taking it via governance. In either the charitable, financing, or governance scenario you’re having people do work(a limited resource) to do something that you get “for free” in the natural incentive scenario. This work would be much more produce producing value on top of your system rather than having to go into paving over deficiency in your foundational system.
I’ll give some examples here, but keep in mind I’m not recommending these at this time. They are exemplars only.
We have one ICOS, one replica, one maintainer. If you want to govern it, why? A semblance of decentralization? As an example? Fine, great goals. But pouring more money into it when it is at that stage, I’d argue is a waste of resources. Instead point those resources at creating a second, third, fourth and , fifth ICOS and replica and add a mechanism so that the replic demands a round robin between them. If a node provider has to pick one, you will be assured that the node providers will validate and become experts of their own accord and without any outside incentivization. The added bonus you get is that if a bug gets into one of the replica versions, the others pick up the slack and the chain doesn’t stall. Your system has picked up some anti-fragility. Ethereum has this built in as a core tenant as the multi-client policy. Right now, until the IC is feature complete I don’t think we should do this as you have to build everything 5 times. Once we get toward the end of the road map it becomes more practical.
My argument is that paying for artificial incentives now is not productive if natural incentives will do later.
Take subnet arrangement. If the node providers had to put up stake in proportion to the virtual tvl manged by a subnet, and that subnet paid more rewards based on that tvl, then you would have natural competition emerge and node provider A would be more than happy to tell you why node provider B was insufficiently decentralized so that they get a chance at the higher reward.(the mechanics of how this would work seem challenging, but the example stands that if node providers were some competitive then they would become experts themselves and become trustworthy to follow(or at least pay attention to) because of the amount of value they have on the line.
You can see an echo of this in SNS policing. I was not a huge fan of NNS gate keeping if SNSs, but one natural incentive it has created is that trust in the NNS is now somewhat tied to what the NNS does and that is, at least somewhat correlated to ICP price. As a result, when some of us see a really bad SNS proposal there are typically immediately critical voices. Unfortunately a few seem to have slipped through the governance , so we still have a ways to go.
It is great that some of the grants bubbled some issues to the surface, but it was then amplified by Adam’s natural response to protect his significant stake. The grants run out.
All of this to wrap up in this conclusion: I like the direction of what you are doing. I’ll support what you are doing. I’m not against short term bootstrapping of governance as a part of a plan to set the underlying mechanisms as well. But I’d encourage you to not try to govern the ungovernable and point any resources your system raises at building it the mechanisms that produce natural incentives instead of just paying for people to review. Once you start paying out of extracted value you are creating an institution that will be very hard to get rid of and that will actively work against a natural mechanisms solution.
Thanks for engaging in discussion, and we need more of these kinds of discussions and more effort and delivery like what you are trying to do here. I hope the discussion is productive. I certainly have a lot to learn from those that have been engaging on the review side at a deeper level than I have.
(Note: perhaps this discussion is different if price action was up and to the right only…but as resources are significantly scarce in the ecosystem, raising these concerns is out of a desire for optimization of those resources)
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Okay, you’re of the opinion that the IC doesn’t need to demonstrate any tangible governance decentralisation until it’s at the end of its road map (if it were even able to get that far under such conditions), 10 or 20 years down the road? I don’t think this is a popular opinion. It’s certainly one that would make me turn my back on the IC (if it were the status quo). Thankfully it’s not, and this is why huge effort has gone into making IC OS versions verifiable, why we have initiatives like the Grants for Voting neurons, and why significant effort is going into designing a better governance incentives framework. Because the existing one doesn’t work.
You’re making an assumption, and not acknowledging that significant natural incentives already exist (and rewards are minted on the assumption that those natural incentives work). Your suggestion about a future ICOS arrangement isn’t generalisable to other NNS topics, and I’m also sceptical that such a system would even be well suited to the ICOS election topic and/or the deployment of ICOS versions to specific subnets.
How so? We shouldn’t be depending on any one mechanism.
This is all that’s being suggested. Maturity cascades to followees has been on the table for a long time. I’m simply suggesting a less drastic and more flexible solution by suggesting that it should be an opt in feature, with flexibility for neurons to choose how much maturity they share.
Cool, thanks
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I forgot this one thing yesterday. The meme above assumes that paying people for governance is not a good idea because it can be exploited and leads to problems.
But its also important to understand that there is no definitive proof of that not happening behind the scenes. People maybe already getting paid to participate in the governance and for pushing topics/proposals. Maybe some have best interests of ICP at their heart or some may not.
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