Hello, I go by Nihilor on all platforms, my name is Ben. I am a father of 6 and have been in crypto since the ETH ICO days. My purpose behind this proposal is to address the euphoria over token minting/tokenomics changes that seems to be taking hold in our community. I realize it can be painful when the price seems to keep going down and that a few tweaks to tokenomics might seem to be a magic bullet that will solve all your problems. It is rarely that simple, but I believe simply having these conversations and subsequent proposals will cause investors and developers to think twice about using our platform. We must be ethical, responsible, and equitable in our use of the NNS. I believe that unrestrained DAO’s are a recipe for chaos and destruction. I want to see ICP succeed, and to this end I propose we make a few tweaks to how we operate, perhaps the equivalent of of a constitution or laws that we agree to be bound by. This is necessary, in my opinion, because at this rate I cant imagine anyone would put millions of dollars at risk in this ecosystem without minimal guarantees for restricted operation of the all powerful NNS. Below are the changes I propose to secure our platform and provide faith in our governance.
Inflation is capped - Outside of normal operation the NNS can not simply mint ICP. If the NNS decides to make an expenditure, it will be subtracted from maturity across all neurons until the debt is fully paid. “Printing” money should never feel free or easy, we need to be frugal and responsible stewards of the tokens we control. This will include any future treasury.
Tokenomics changes require a 75% supermajority vote - If we decide to change any part of our tokenomics such as: node rewards, staking rewards, burn rate, forcibly changing neuron dissolve delay, and transaction fees. A supermajority vote will be required of no less than 75% (yes) of all votes cast.
I believe these two changes are needed and will begin to form a foundation of trust in the NNS which is needed for long term health and growth.
People are just burning ICP when they throw stuff up like this. Cool if you want to stir discussion, but not so great if you actually want your thing passed.
The reality is that this isn’t possible without fundamentally changing things. Motion proposals have no effect…they aren’t even really binding. Ultimately the item has to be coded and put up for a replica vote. Anything can go into a replica vote and the system can’t know if there are tokenomics changes in it or not. The actual efficacious thing is approving a new replica with your code in it. You can’t discern between types of changes. You’d have to make all changes to the replica require 75% and we’d likely not ever get anything done.
Your suggestion for #1 is a really interesting proposal and I’d encourage you to look into what would be required to actually implement it.
@Nihilor.ic is concerned about a change that takes away from the NNS and we already have the rules outlined on the nns and we those who own neurons have agreed to those rules, leave it alone but there could be an up side to letting those who want to get out of their agreement, more rewards for the rest of us and a bunch of complainers gone from our landscape.
It’s not applying to all proposals on the tokenomics. It basically confirms that the tokenomics we have now cannot be changed unless we have a super majority.
Every month icp creates pees out thin air and pays the node providers which is inflation. It’s small but still inflation. If we can all somehow just subtract stake maturity every month from every neuron to pay for this then we would fix the staked maturity problem.
If anything on the nns isn’t binding then what’s the point of the nns if the dao can’t even control the blockchain it’s supposed to govern?
Yeah none of us know how to implement this but could we not just set up a bounty to perform this task. Like ridiculous amount and then perform thorough before merging into the NNS.
The replica updates are binding. If you really want to change the economics you write code and suggest a replica update. Motion proposals are great for signaling, but they don’t do anything and aren’t binding. At this point, a motion proposal is basically asking DFINITY to do something. They generally do what the network wants, but they have the ability to prioritize and until the code is ready you can motion away but nothing will happen.
Right, this is looking for support at which point we can look into technical implementation if this passes. My goal is to stor discussion in a positive direction and hopefully help create a lasting positive change on the IC.
Most major tokenomics changes are submitted without code to check for support/approval before work is put into making a change. My goal here is to set a threshold above 50% before we dedicate resources.
I believe strongly that this is how we should approach spending and changing tokenomics. If this isnt technically possible I am sure a compromise can be reached at some level. the NNS should be open to proposals from non technical persons and not just a playground for developers. After all, the vast majority of funds will come from non technical investors. If non technical persons are not able to start conversations for change, then I see no point to the DAO. Also, I’m a huge fan of the technology, but the DAO seems like distilled chaos.
Hi @Nihilor.ic,
many thanks for your suggestion. I think both topics on which you touch are very relevant, i.e.,
The development of total supply over time.
The trade-off between stabillity of the NNS tokenomics (or maybe the NNS governance in general) vs the ability to dynamically update the NNS.
Given these very relevant topics you now jump to two suggestions (cap total supply outside of “normal operations” and apply a supermajority for tokenomics changes), for which I have the followings comments (expressing my personal view and not necessarily DFINITY’s view)
Given that these are quite fundamental suggestions, this requires further syndication and discussion (potentially this could also be discussed in the governance working group.) A syndication of 1 day seems to be very short.
I also have a few follow-up question to clarify, e.g. what exactly constitutes “normal operations”, how precisely would we seperate tokenomics changes from other governance changes, etc.
Hence, from personal view, I am not supportive of this proposal as is, but I am very happy to have further discussions on the underlying topics.
Hi, and thank you for responding . To answer your questions I consider normal operations to be node rewards and staking rewards as laid out in our current roadmap. Anything in excess of that should be paid by stakeholder maturity. My goal here is to eliminate free money printing as an option in people minds when approaching the NNS.my second point regarding a super majority vote for tokenomics changes could probably be better defined as a we need to have a system in place that requires near unanimous agreement for major decisions such as the proposed lock of seed investor tokens, removing a canister, changing nns rewards. I threw this together understanding it probably won’t pass, but I wanted to change the course of discussion into first setting boundaries on the NNS in an effort to provide assurances to current and future investors that we are dedicated to providing a secure, predictable, and safe environment.
As a suggestion to stem the chaos, I’d offer a sort of compromise. It states two things:
Non-technical folks are more than welcome to bring amazing ideas to the table.
They have to have at least pseudo code, and preferably running code before submission.
They have to have a rough consensus before submission. Rough consensus means that all reasonable objectives have been addressed and either mitigated, rejected as a fair trade-off, or an explanation has been given as to why the objection is incorrect in its assumptions.
This does mean that non-technical folks will have to work with technical folks. This seems like an entirely sensible feature since we are talking about a technical system and any proposal has to have a pathway to implementation.
The token working group is already working on some processes around this.
I firmly believe we need a form of law in place to address how the nns operates. The crazy suggestions recently I felt needed a response, people were getting to excited about minting ICP. When we spend money people need to understand stakeholders are paying the price, we must not punish builders/devs who might be holding tokens by increasing inflation to fund expenditures. I understand I broke procedure by rushing this to the nns, and as a result expect it to fail in this form. I think I will make a new post soon to create a conversation about funding nns proposals which require ICP to execute.