Dear ICP Community,
Diego from DFINITY here.
We at DFINITY Foundation have seen a lot of questions regarding two community-authored motion proposals recently. On behalf of DFINITY, I would like to address them as best as I can.
The Relevant Motion Proposals
The two proposals are:
- #80970 Spam Prevention - Convert from system-based rewards to voter-based rewards by Skilesare.
- #86639 Temperature Check: NNS Treasury by dfisher
#80970 (“Spam proposal”): Why DFINITY Voted YES
As Bjoern A from DFINITY noted in the forum, DFINITY voted ACCEPT on #80970 (Spam Prevention) because it would reduce the spam by removing the incentive to create spam.
#80970 (“Spam proposal”): The Controversial Parts
This proposal on its face is not controversial, but it does have some vague wording that many in the community saw as potentially malicious. So it is worth explaining what the intent was.
To be blunt, There was a section that arose much controversy:
A result of this proposal will be a reduction in total minted ICP due to the fact that some voters do not vote on all proposals or follow a voter for all proposals. In a follow-on proposal, the NNS can determine what to do with that “abandoned” ICP. We suggest an NNS treasury but will leave it to a future proposal to finalize that. The following illustration shows the handing out of rewards in the old vs new system.
This section was vague enough that it allowed the following interpretations to be read by some folks:
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“Abandoned ICP” implied that there would be maturity created or ICP minted or rewards that would have gone to non-voters, but instead go to some sort of slush fund or dark pool of crypto.
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There was a comment by DFINITY about tracking “unallocated rewards.” Some people interpreted it to mean that DFINITY agreed with creating rewards and moving them somewhere else to some other fund.
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There were follow-up comments by both the proposal’s author and others in the forum about potentially using these undistributed rewards to fund decentralized work activities.
The misunderstanding is obvious in hindsight so we want to clarify our intent and the proposal itself:
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The Spam proposal actually decreases rewards - The spam proposal deliberately is intended to NOT create rewards or maturity. This means that under the actual proposal listed, there would be now much fewer rewards created per day (a drop in rewards or minting). Some users think it could be up to 250,000 less ICP per week entering circulation than before. We expected lots of folks would see this as a win/win.
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“Unallocated ICP” is not created in rewards or minted - As Bjoern noted, the intent of the spam proposal is that the system would keep track of the metric (purely for academic reasons) of how many rewards it did NOT create that day. Why? to see how much spam proposal change made rewards drop. No new ICP. No “slush fund” as some mentioned. It is entirely for metrics (imagine dashboards).
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Yes, the proposal and proposal’s author kicked around the idea of an “NNS treasury” that could be funded from the ICP not minted, but in the same breath, they noted that this was out of the scope of the spam proposal itself. We, DFINITY, took the proposal at face value and considered it outside the scope of spam proposal and voted accordingly. If the proposal had considered NNS treasury to be a prerequisite or part of the proposal, DFINITY would have voted NO most likely.
#86639 (“NNS treasury”): Why DFINITY Voted YES
As Bjoern from DFINITY noted, DFINITY voted YES because the motion proposal was merely a temperature check to see if the conversation should continue.
We voted YES because we did not want to discourage people from discussing technical or governance topics. We thought that if we voted NO or ABSTAINED it would be tantamount to snuffing out the fragile flame of discussion within the community. After all, DFINITY members have been largely absent from the conversations around NNS Treasury. We like seeing the community get involved more and more.
#86639 (“NNS treasury”): The Controversial Parts
As DFINITY has noted in previous explanations of its votes, it tries to follow certain guidelines in its voting. To summarize, the guidelines are:
In order to elicit a YES vote from the Foundation. We would like to see at the very least proposals match the following criteria:
Tangible - The proposal should be understandable and concrete. A proposal that is “make the world a better place” is not tangible enough.
Achievable - The proposal should be something DFINITY believes is achievable. This means that a proposal to “make the IC consensus protocol be faster than light” would not pass since we do not believe science can make it work.
a. Furthermore, there should be a “path from proposal to code running on the IC”. This means that an NNS proposal to add a copy on the NNS Frontend Dapp to help new stakers would be valid… but an NNS proposal to “ask entity X to change their website to help new stakers” would not be valid.About the IC and In the interest of the IC - The proposal should be about the IC and of interest to the IC.
This Proposal was a tricky one even for our subjective tests because it was debated how much it met this criteria. For example:
- Tangible - the proposal is very tangible. It is about whether the community should continue the dialogue and exploration? It is not something like “solve world hunger.”
- Achievable - It is very achievable to participate or NOT participate in the discussions around the NNS treasury.
- About the IC and In the interest of the IC - The proposal is very much about the IC, not say “world hunger.”
One could argue that it was not tangible to “continue a conversation”. That, we think, is a very fair rejoinder and reasonable. We made a subjective call that it was tangible enough but reasonable for folks to disagree.
Lastly, we do think we made a big mistake in our voting: unlike other votes, we did not communicate in a timely manner what the “vote meant and did not mean.” In previous votes, we communicated what we wished to convey (and not convey) via our votes. We did not do it this time and we think this was a mistake. We will certainly try to do better here.
