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

How is a treasury not premature, if we don’t even have a reasonable means to manage it, the people in charge of it, ensure transparency, responsibility & accountability?

Additionally, 60%+ of active voting power is controlled by two Named Neurons. This is nowhere near decentralized enough to put named neurons in control of a treasury, or to use the NNS to elect treasurers.

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The point I was trying to make is that if we don’t even have conversations about ideas like these and how to address the challenges they bring then there won’t be anything to motivate change.

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The point is “who’s skin is in the game”. Because it certainly isn’t the NN that’s in control of the VP% it represents.

And the quantity of named neurons you follow doesn’t do anything, as the NNS doesn’t create a poll of followed NN votes, to vote in accordance to. The first NN to vote, casts the votes. First come first serve. What really needs to happen is the decentralization of voting power, rather than centralizing all voting power across all named neurons.

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This is an interesting point. I don’t disagree with you but it does make me wonder if we haven’t lost (or at least significantly deviated from) the original vision statement for the SNS. I thought the SNS was going to be the key to Open Internet Services. Finding way to democratize the development of open source protocols. I don’t see how we do that if these OIS are expected to return some value to the stakeholders.

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A proposal has already passed…and we are awaiting implementation…that allows you to change your vote if you disagree with your named neurons…of course, this doesn’t help if you don’t know the vote is happening. I think NN is a great way(maybe the only way) to have ongoing liquid democracy because no one has enough time to track all that will be going on if this thing takes off, but it is very very important that people maintain a veto over their NN. The NN can be powerful in forcing action, but a veto in the back pocket protects the whole network. We need a good information system that raises an ‘alarm’ when the need arises for people to review their named neuron’s decisions.

The alternative here is to force nodes to put up stake and slash them if they don’t follow the rules ETH2 style. Then the governance mechanism becomes rough consensus and running code. No NNS is necessary. I’m starting to think it may be the way to go, but then voting rewards go away too. After the last week, maybe that is best. :man_shrugging:

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English is not my first language so I’ll try this again.

Did we have a “spam for rewards” problem at genesis? If no, then what I’m saying is that ICP Maximalist created the proposal(s) that started the “spam for rewards” problem.

In case I am not being clear, here’s another shot: There was a proposal(s) made by ICP Maximalist. After that proposal(s) passed it created the “spam for rewards” problem.

Last try: ICP Maximalist made a series of proposals on the NNS in order to promote governance participation. We started having a “spam for rewards” problem after those series of proposals were made by ICP Maximalist.

I am speaking from memory so I could be slightly off.

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Fun fact…that proposal 38985 passed over 9 months ago and AFAIK it’s on no roadmap. It sure would be nice to be able to incentivize someone to apply their brain cells to get it implemented. I still think it’s one of the most important proposals we could adopt for decentralization for all the reasons you cite.

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I don’t have that superpower, just merely pointing out what I think is a fact.

If your accusation is that the proposal did in fact create a spam problem, then yes, you are correct.

If you are implying that they created a spam problem on purpose then I think you are incorrect. One can see clearly behind them, but it would be genuinely unfair and probably giving them too much credit to think that they could cause that problem on purpose.

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I don’t know what their intentions were, however it’s absolutely possible that this was all by design.

Good question. The problems did not start at Genesis but very soon after. ICP maximalist had nothing to do with that. In fact, some users actively created proposals just for rewards and wrote their intent in the forum and proposals.

Here is an example post from May 2022 (6 months ago before the proposals in question):

I don’t see how ICP maximalist could have created the spam problem so I’m very certain they did not. I’m not even certain they existed when spam started (could be wrong about this).

Tbh, I’m a bit concerned (not your fault or responsibility so not blaming you) about the ICPM scapegoating for spam when many other entities have submitted spam proposals, but in reality the true problem is that the Tokenomics incentivized it.

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Fair point. We will certainly make sure we do better job following community’s guidance on these things. That’s a fair criticsm.

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Okay, I honestly think you’re mistaken. I’ve been following the NNS, and ICP Maximalist on telegram for close to a year now. I know that ICPMaximalist neuron now Synapse.vote made a series of proposals in an effort to incentivize voting on on the NNS. The spam proposal problem started after these proposals. The only thing I’m not certain about is whether the ICPMaximalist neuron created the proposal that changed tokenomics such that it incentivized spamming. I really hope you understand me now. Sorry for being really slow.

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That’s the message that @Ciaran has been preaching. I’m starting to think he is right. Indeed, these same governance conversations will occur over and over and over again…especially since volunteer participation is unsustainable, which means that we will see never ending turnover in people who have an opinion to express. That said I still think there would need to be a way for the people who are receiving voting rewards to earn those voting rewards by some mechanism of performing work. Otherwise it seems ICP would turn into a security since consensus for ICP is achieved in other ways.

NNS Ethos

Super Mario Takedown

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I think we could still have voting…it would just be voting on the on-chain governance parts like adding to sub-nets, etc. And adding the slash of misbehaving node providers(if it can’t be programmatic). “Governance” would only be through nodes deciding on a replica to run.

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Makes sense. I feel like so much of what I have always understood and believed about the NNS is evolving rapidly in the last few days.

Perhaps Governance Motion proposals (soft topics) should be a separate system based on POH with 1 person, 1 vote, with a lot less financial reward tied to it so people get a lot less visceral about governance.

Perhaps the NNS is supposed to be oligarchic, not democratic, and should only be used to govern the protocol.

Perhaps it would be better to have simple staking, minimal work, and low expectation for active participation.

So much to think about…

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@diegop I think he is referring to the weighting of the governance proposals from 1 to 20 which is a proposal that ICPMN/Synapse championed and it was this proposal that created the incentives for spam proposal in the first place.

Have you noticed the spam has all but stopped now that weighting was reset?

But now we have a spam proposal which in my opinion has nothing to do with spam…

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I think I understand this points of view from the current framework perspective. But that does not imply a new governing framework is not possible. We are using a new tool with old thinking patterns.

Do not understand I have a solution to this, as this is a complex matter.

This discussion should have a different post and create a new thread.

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If slashing can’t be programmatic the IC’s in trouble IMO. If you want to get to play by the rules of autonomous protocols you have to be… autonomous. If you have humans deciding what’s what, expect other humans working for nation states to either bring the system under their control or isolate it if they can’t (ban the coin from exchanges, permissioned stablecoins, etc).

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I thought nothing could disappoint me more than yours and David’s giddy calculations on how much money can be siphoned out of the network and into a centralized organisation: A Call to Action: Using the NNS for Growth but the thought of NNS as an oligarchy is truly discouraging.

I would hate to see us turn a beautiful web3 vision into this.

(Edited after getting a better grasp of context)

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