The CodeGov known neuron voted to Reject proposals 135635 and 135636. The final tally of our Followees was 0 YES, 7 NO.
Below are comments from each of our Followees that led to their decisions about these proposals:
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This forum thread surfaced a lot of information from people who know the node provider onboarding work process like @GAbassad @Lerak and @snoopy, who took the time to tag the allegedly fake node providers, all of which have posted (@Vladyslav here, @Alex43342 here, @Volodymyr here, @MaksT6 here, and @JunQ here) to identifying themselves and their background. George Bassadone posted here and here providing a lot of insight regarding his relationships with many of the people and organizations named in the proposal as well. George even directly responding to Alex’s questions here. All of this information refutes the claims of this proposal and addresses the concerns raised by Adam (who is one of ICPs biggest whales and submitted this proposal). This is in addition to the very helpful and professional context provided by @katiep and the explanation of the official DFINITY position provided by @bjoernek.
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I don’t think any concrete evidence has yet been presented about this group of NPs. In any case, I think that rather than throwing out proposals that directly target individuals there should be a more general process put forward to detect and respond to this sort of activity, and that would make for a more appropriate Governance proposal.
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Rejected based on the fact that some nodes are currently active in subnets, and mostly for the way the proposals have been raised. Feels more like a witch hunt rather than anything.
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While I would certainly like to see a more thorough investigation on this topic, I feel like there is no clear evidence that all these accounts are linked to the same person/few people at this point in time and with the available information.
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I would vote to approve the moment there is clear evidence that all these accounts are connected and there is a clear risk of a malicious attack, after a more structured approach. For now, I perceive it more as speculation and impulsive claims.
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I intend to reject the proposals as they are right now. I do acknowledge that there are some aspects that dearly require clean-up (e.g. GeoNodes LLC being controlled by two people that are also node providers). I would also like more clarity around the connections between the group of 5 Eastern European NPs that all share the same DCs; maybe it will turn out that we should rather regard them as a single node provider.
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I do not see evidence for collusion between those two groups, and I don’t think I have sufficient information at this point that would justify banning the second group, as per the proposal.
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I also think we should change the node reward scheme; the function that lowers the rewards for more nodes of the same NP is detrimental to the overall platform, since it invites and encourages sybil attacks.
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So lots of work to be done, but I do not agree with the proposals as they are.
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there’s also a risk that some of the accused people might actually be genuine and ended up for some coincidence in the same group. Before banning anyone, I need clear evidence.
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I want to be very cautious. An impulsive proposal, a couple of spreadsheets with no explanation of what they mean, and plenty of comments muted by the community are not a good enough reason for banning an entire group of people.
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I voted to reject—not because I doubt the merit of their allegations, but because, if we see ourselves as a court system, then the presumption should be innocence until proven otherwise. We should not be finding anyone guilty before establishing their guilt.
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The claims of collusion that are less credible and are the dominant theme in the current motion proposal 135636 are based on things like node providers that all have the number 23 in their username on the forum or node providers who used the same onboarding statement or node providers that onboarded in the Aug 2023 to Dec 2023 timeframe. Node providers cannot come and go freely in the ICP network. It has to happen when node slots are open and according to a certain onboarding process. In 2023, new node positions opened up for Gen 2 node providers and the openings were specifically targeted to onboard in less represented regions of the world according to the approved topology targets at the time. This means there was an influx of new node providers over a several month period who were all asked to use a boilerplate onboarding statement and who received advice to copy and paste a successful onboarding forum post and/or proposal. Some of these people were new to ICP, so they had no forum post history and they chose new unique user names that included the calendar year. None of this was against the rules and there were no requirements that these new node providers were avid ICP enthusiasts with a known identity history. Many of them made simple business decisions to get involved in ICP as a node provider because it was a profitable option for them. These are the examples where it makes no sense to cluster. They have no relationship other than they onboarded at the same time and followed the onboarding instructions.
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I plan to vote no to both proposals 135635 and 135636. I don’t believe credible evidence has been provided to justify removing any node providers or to support the accusations of collusion. I think the valuable action that can be taken from Alex’s post and from these proposals is to improve the node provider onboarding work process, which is something that was already widely recognized as a need before all this mudslinging started. I also think there is value in identifying clusters of node providers based on known and acceptable relationships (e.g. husband and wife, business associates, node providers that have onboarded under different business names in different parts of the world, and/or new node providers that purchased or transferred nodes from existing node providers) and to use that in the decentralization metrics of the DRE tool. These things can and should happen regardless of the outcome of this motion proposal. However, regarding the specific proposals, the concrete action in this proposal is to remove 5 node providers who are alleged to be fake, which they are not. I do not support that action.