DFINITY Foundation’s vote on Governance proposal #80970 (“Spam proposal”) and #86639 ("Temperature Check")

I think this is all very reasonable and I share that same thinking. It’s why I applaud the folks who call things out and keep us all honest.

From my POV you are doing a good thing @Accumulating.icp . You should always ask about what doesn’t look right to you.

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I think this analogy isn’t really accurate. Rewarding node providers, and voters, is not the same as also creating an NNS treasury to be used to fund public goods through a voting mechanism used to allocate funds. The first two are much less risky to the stability of the entire IC and are different for many other reasons.

If proponents of the NNS treasury believe that funding for public goods is needed, I think they would recognize that NNS treasury isn’t the only way to fund public goods, and there are less risky alternative approaches which i’ve mentioned in prior posts (sns, ethereum uses gitcoin types of funding mechanism to raise succesfuly hundreds of millions, and many other “voluntary contribution methods”) that would potentially lead to more optimal resource allocation than an NNS treasury.

Perhaps the default approach should be to try these low risk funding routes to see if they are viable options, prior to embarking on the high risk endeavor of NNS treasury and only if they fail and prove to be untenable, then seeking other alternatives. Ideally, a combination of these voluntary funding mechanisms would render the need for a nns treasury as moot, as it would satisfy the original intent behind creating the treasury without the associated risk.

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It is not accurate at all. I’m going to link to my conversation with Bob Bodily about this topic in which I argued why this comparison does not stand to scrutiny (and he agreed). Scroll up from here: https://twitter.com/bobbodily/status/1586061789216677888?s=46&t=mFo_rbGb9veiTyG6dhC3Xg

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I think this is very sensible. In fact, it’s been stated multiple times that “NNS treasury” may have been the wrong label to use and that there may be better options. I also think that everyone who supports the treasury idea has also stated on multiple occasions that starting small is the best path forward. These are all ideas that were intended to be fleshed out in a working group by anyone who wanted to participate.

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When a WG is formed, please keep me up to date - I will be in attendance. @wpb

I suppose it’s not so much a direct question, but rather a statement. I’m not suggesting that you, Synapse, or ICDevs really could have done much differently. I’m merely stating that the way our governance is setup, is to enable the passive staker. Meaning the grand majority of the community, delegates their voting power to someone else. Leaving the forums extremely barren of actual community consensus, but rather bomboarded solely the opinions of those who make the decision - not those it affects.

So if anything, I suppose I am suggesting this was not a true community temperature check.

I’d agree that this specific conversation has not been an echo chamber, but rather, pretty productive. I’m just stating that the forums do tend to become an echo chamber of the previously stated party.
‘ Leaving the forums extremely barren of actual community consensus, but rather bomboarded solely the opinions of those who make the decision - not those it affects. ’

Again, I suppose collaboration is a better word than collusion. And sorry, I was under the impression you represented ICDevs. Going forward, I’ll simply refer to you directly.

While “Collusion” was the wrong word, nonetheless, this proposal was propagated in the dark by DFINITY & Afat. I was unaware that it had originally been rejected by DFINITY, but I was informed that DFINITY had reached out & specifically asked for this proposal to be created.

I respect the public discussion, but I’m sure you can see where the distrust comes from. It’s not a good look when someone who represents 6% of Voting Power , works in private with DFINITY, to push a proposal, that now directly enables another proposal that could fund them (as discussed in townhalls).

It’s not meant to be an attack, but merely an adjective - just trying to describe the situation as I see it.

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I’d argue that the issue isn’t the inability to un-delegate voting power, but rather the fact that we’ve set a “set & forget” precedent, during a time with 3? Named Neurons. This has caused a disproportionate allocation of voting power, not because people feel as though the neurons represent their best interest, but because there were only 2 options available that ensured you’d receive maximum rewards passively.

Hello Wenzel.

In regards to how two names neurons can achieve 66% of voting power;

  • When DFINITY Votes, they cast ~100m votes
  • When Synapse Votes, they cast ~40m votes
  • There is ~220m active voting power in topics that are not completely delegated to DFINITY

100m/220m= ~45%
40m/220m= ~18%

Which equates to ~63%, sorry, seems I was a bit off.

How do I come to the conclusion that Named Neurons will be in control of the entity? It’s simple. You want to do it through the NNS. How do we control the NNS? Named Neurons.

“Do you have any such idea as to how to balance liquid democracy??” (I hope this wasn’t meant to be an insult Wenzel, especially with all these “attacking” accusations)

It’s quite simple. Periodic Followee Resets, on a quarterly to semi-annual basis, to ensure that those who wish to passive stake, have to periodically confirm the named neurons they’re following. This ensures that the follower, is regularly confirming the followee still represents their best interests.

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Come Stake $ICP with NNS and build on the Internet Computer!

2 entities can take your money AND take down your app… But why would they?

Just trust them bro

Maybe this gives a sense of how it looks

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  1. I agree we need multiple foundations
  2. I agree it’s a risk that Dfinity is a single point of failure
  3. I don’t think the IC would die without Dfinity…unless all the Dfinity team all also disappeared…
  4. The NNS could in the case of an emergency step in…I don’t think we are there…
  5. I’m not against a treasury…
  6. I am against funding it from the NNS
  7. we don’t need roads, water, electric, infrastructure with a blockchain…but also those have use cases that people pay for
  8. make the case of what needs to be built and raise funding
  9. if you want to take a % of platform revenues (ICP burn) to fund its existence that is a different story than hitting people who have locked their funds for 8 years … but we can’t manufacture value by extracting it from the network…in order to increase value you have to attract value into the network…
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I think the topic has been deviated from the original topic. It is convenient to close the topic and open other different ones depending on the conversation. Valuable opinions can be lost from so many answers, but not related to the topic.

Greetings to all !

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The NNS was, when I invested, created with fairness for all, in my opinion and I loved that I could follow and be rewarded by giving someone else my vote.

To be honest I had no idea about the DFINITY forum till I did some research and became a member to be a part of the discussions.

The one question I have right now after being a member for some time is about the comments that those who participate in voting deserve more rewards but when I go onto the NNS to vote I don’t see much else than network upgrades, renaming neurons, spam and nothing that I need to understand.

I don’t see where these Active neuron holders deserve more rewards by taking away from other neuron holders, please give me one example!

I also would like to hear from those who don’t vote or as they say are inactive as there are many assumptions about why you don’t participate, I would like to hear your side of the story or maybe you are unaware that this forum exists as there is no information on the NNS on how to be active or is this deliberate.

As far as spam goes, if you want to create a proposal on the NNS you should have a 1000 icp on your neuron and add a spam button with the except or reject buttons, if you are spamming then your neuron is burned, simple no spam but no we have to have bells, whistles and handles without success.

None I have seen anyways, same old subjects but now we have a new idea about how to take rewards from others, just missing a sink because the treasury already has the neuron holders to take rewards from.

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@dfisher I definitely sympathize with your decentralization motives here. However, creating more DFinity organizations will not solve the more fundamental problem of how to implement collective prioritization. If there were 10 Definity organizations deciding upon the future of the IC, it would create almost as much unresolvable conflict as making all neurons collectively responsible for the significant number of prioritizations and resource allocation tradeoffs to make during this journey. As I emphasized before, the NNS currently can’t handle prioritizations such as timing and resource allocation conflicts, which form the bulk of the most important decisions in all organizations. Approval voting simply isn’t fit for the purpose of prioritization, nor will it ever be.

The only solution that I see is implementing some sort of collective prioritization process within DFinity, just like I have suggested for the NNS itself. The general public will eventually need some assurance that DFinity is operated as a resilient, permissionless DAO. That means developing and implementing a collective prioritization processes to ensure that all power has been sufficiently decentralized on all major prioritization decisions (i.e., excluding low level task decisions that have no significant budgetary or timing impact). Reaching this point could be a few years away even if we start right now, so I strongly suggest that we start soon.

The Internet Computer won’t be perceived as a beta project for much longer. As the stakes become higher and more real, the cracks in the decentralization narrative will become exponentially more obvious and repugnant to those who depend on the IC to sustain their livelihoods and ecosystems.

In the meantime, we just have to accept the following: 1) DFinity is a single point of failure in this visionary project, which (if unchanged) will increasingly endanger its fundamental mission to oppose both centralized power and censorship; and 2) DFinity is essentially run under a traditional dictatorship model, like every organization on the planet today that is too large for deliberative democracy and other consensus reaching processes.

From my perspective, I am quite OK with this concentrated risk and dictatorial power during the startup phase. It could even add to both innovation agility and the prospects of success given the trust that I currently have for the DFinity team and its vision. However, in the longer term, I think we all agree that we should never have to rely on trust, and we most certainly can’t rely on any dictatorship remaining benevolent or censorship-free when the economic and societal stakes for the IC grow exponentially higher. That is why I have been so emphatic about initiating some sort of collective effort to cross the “prioritization chasm”. This is the only way the decentralization vision can become a genuine reality – in bulletproof fashion – instead of just being an illusion of decentralized power that we have today.

As for the treasury fund, there really is no point in even voting on this, let alone on an actual implementation proposal, until we have a collective prioritization process in place that could fairly allocate these scarce resources in the most optimal fashion.

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I agree with you @Accumulating.icp . It’s one reason why I think the “temperature check” did not at all hit its intent.

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I don’t disagree with this.

The following model has advantage of allowing people to come to quick consensus (there is a reason that there have been hundreds of updates to the IC, while only a handful in ETH during the same time).

But it also has the consequence you described.

Could we design something to do better?

I’m optimistically we can all soften the costs or even remove it. I admit I’m not sure what that looks like, but that’s why i support open design processes.

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I don’t think the Followee model needs to be scrapped necessarily (this is where I’ll disclaim my bias; I vote for the Accumulators Neuron & TFC), but I do think it needs some updates. For example, the Periodic Followee Reset proposal passed 6+ months ago, and still has not been implemented. This doesn’t completely fix the issue, but it ensures as a passive follower, you’re forced to re-delegate your voting power every 6 months (I think quarterly could be better, similar to a company showing earnings, but potentially more tedious) if you want to keep receiving rewards. Again, this doesn’t completely solve it, as they could continuously just set&forget the same neuron - but atleast neuron owners are forced to look into where they’ve assigned their voting power frequently, which hopefully inspires research. @diegop

EDIT: I think it could also be beneficial to have a timer within the neuron tab, disclaiming when the next followee reset is.

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This is true and it’s entirely our fault it has not been implemented (NNS team too focused on SNS). This is being rectified ASAP.

I’m personally of the mind of:

  1. Make small changes (like proposal above)

  2. Wait and see

  3. Add new proposal once you have let enough time pass.

I like to let things bake and patterns emerge with this kind of stuff.

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Glad to hear this is now a priority, thanks! @diegop

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your voice and your knowledge must be heard by the community for the good of IC. Bullish on IC

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