Just because you dont see a bunch of people defending wenzel on the forums, doesnt mean many people dont agree with his position on some of these matters. Most just dont want to get involved in the drama and trolling in the forums.
Nevertheless you guys will contine to troll anyone who disagrees with anything your boss says. Carry on 
@bjoernek I fully support posing these questions to node providers.
I couldnât say it better than @Gian has in his response, especially the following:
Dear all,
Many thanks for all the valuable feedback provided both here in the forum and in the last Node Provider Working Group on Monday April 14th !
Based on your feedback, we have updated the question list for assessing node provider independence, which is provided below. Additionally, we are including the complete, revised node provider self-declaration form, now enhanced with a clause on lawful sources of funds and wealth, following legal advice.
Please review the updated materials and share any additional thoughts. In parallel, we are consulting with audit firms on the questions and review process.
Detailed Comments on Changes:
Looking forward to your comments!
â-------------
The Network Nervous System (NNS) is committed to the principles of decentralization to enhance the overall security and reliability of the ICP network. Moreover, node machines must not be funded or controlled by criminal entities, as these critical infrastructure components form the foundation upon which the integrity of the entire ecosystem depends. To achieve these goals, comprehensive disclosures from node providers are required. In particular, node providers are required to
As part of the governance structure, the Network Nervous System may vote to:
Thanks @bjoernek, can I ask why this part is considered private?
@bjoernek, regarding Q6: When you say âDoes not lead to automatic clusteringâ, then you imply that manual clustering may be considered. Would you require public answers to even more questions, not listed in Q1-Q5, in order to make this decision? Who would make such a clustering decision? Will we all have a debate on the forum about the details of every âOtherâ relationship?
My recommendation would be to add specific Yes/No questions, if you feel that the current list (Q1-Q5) is not complete.
The whole point of having a list of well-defined Yes/No questions is to disclose the material/important relationships, and not to have a free-for-all on the forum about the details of the âotherâ relationships that we donât have to disclose. Details about these family, personal or business relationships you ask about in Q6 should remain private.
@bjoernek, please provide more clarity regarding Q6 and possible clustering decisions. It wasnât discussed in the Node Provider Working Group meeting. We as Node Providers need clarity to the extent of public disclosures.
I believe that the UBO information should be made public to allow the verification of the interdependence among node providers. However, the more detailed ownership structures are primarily relevant for auditors to validate the UBO declarations and do not seem necessary for the general public. Hence, to protect privacy, I suggest that these detailed ownership structures do not have to be publicly disclosed.
The information disclosed in Q6 is not intended to result in clustering, as the criteria for clustering are specified in Q1-Q5. This question provides node providers with an opportunity to disclose any additional relationships beyond friendships and acquaintances that have formed through their roles as node providers.
If significant new patterns emerge from the disclosures in Q6, the community may consider adapting the rules accordingly.
This is not the intent of the question. The purpose of Q6 is to capture any relationships that are not addressed by the predefined criteria in Q1-Q5, giving the opportunity for a comprehensive disclosure.
Iâm trying to wrap my head around how this will work. How will the community validate that a meaningful audit has taken place? Will auditors have known neurons?
This is unacceptable to many Node Providers.
Comprehensive disclosure needs to be well defined as a series of YES/NO questions so that Node Providers can assess the extent of the public disclosures required by the community.
This is exactly the reason why its unacceptable for Node Providers - any disclosures here will just lead to more questions from the community, and they would demand an inappropriate public debate about the specific âotherâ relationship (family, personal or business).
Iâm not sure what youâre saying, could you clarify? It sounds like youâre saying - so that Node Providers can assess how much they can get away with keeping private. Why does anything in this topic need to be private?
Okay, so why not just let them ask their questions. Transparency in this respect is the only way the 13-nodes-per-subnet model works. âNode Provider independenceâ needs to be held to public scrutiny, or it canât be assumed to be a feature of the IC (but it literally needs to be).
Perhaps some distance is needed for the people deeply involved with this currently.
Reading all this makes it sound like applying banking regulations to a decentralized network in order to catch a few bad actors for which there isnât any evidence in the first place. Even if there are family connections between a few gen2 node providers this doesnât make them bad actors given they followed the rules when they onboarded.
The probability that a bad actor is going to the length of infiltrating the network via setting up tons of shell companies, buying node equipment, going through the onboarding process then somehow landing with enough nodes in a single subnet to do some damage goes towards 0. Please enlighten me what the potential damage even is.
There is a way higher probability that a bad actor just pulls up the subnet he wants to target and has now a great directory of exactly who to target in order to take it over. This can be done via compromising machines, social engineering, extortion etc. It happened already on networks where e.g. a 3/5 multisig was guarding lots of funds. So, if anything we should rather advocate for having less data easily publicly accessible regarding the identity of the node providers.
This doesnât mean a check for connections between node providers shouldnât be done. The option already mentioned is a 3rd party auditor checking these and then giving node providers a green light if there are no conflicts. 3rd party auditors are standard in business. There are reputable firms that do exactly this and the community can then rely on the verification by a professional. This eliminates the risk of having more than 1 node controlled by a single entity in a subnet, which to my understanding is the main concern here.
Disclosure: Gen1 node provider who went through full KYC/KYB onboarding with Dfinity in 2020
I must agree with DavidB, the complications created with disclosing more and more personal information publicly does open the node providers for additional security risks, specifically in less developed countries where Node Providers were prepared to take the risk in order to decentralize further. Not all of us has 1st world safety levels when it comes to personal security. Lets keep it inhouse (out of public discussion) and have auditors confirm independence of ownership to satisfy the concerns raised.
Sure. Doesnât mean that the relationship should be concealed though.
Please show your workings
In the future Subnet Membership proposals are likely to no longer be necessary (the decentralisation coefficient calculations will be handled on chain without the need for a proposal, other than to specify and maintain the algorithm). Frequent automated subnet node shuffling would be a useful feature at this stage, significantly reducing the window within which such an exploit could be exploited. If deemed necessary, it would even be feasible to anonymise node membership within subnets (given that the protocol itself would be capable of managing conformity to the IC target topology).
Basically, youâre confusing membership of a node on the network with membership of a node within a subnet. The former should be public, transparent, and reasonably verifiable on demand by the community (in terms of claims about identity and independence). The latter need not be (in a future where itâs handled by the protocol).
Not sure what do you want to see here. Even if you think this is somehow possible while my experience in this space over the last 9 years tells me itâs not.
No new nodes got added to the network for about a year or so. All gen1 node providers were KYCed by dfinity. The theory then must be someone infiltrated the network between gen2 onboarding and over a year ago with enough nodes to land randomly in a single subnet. So lets entertain this thought. What exactly would this entity then wait for over a year so far? What are they trying to do? Please show your workings
How would this be prevented by doxxing every node provider? Wouldnât the malicious entity just fake their documents to stay undiscovered?
Beside that Iâm not aware of a single other network in which validators/node providers get doxxed publicly and for sure not their UBOs and CEOs personally. Itâs pretty baffling to me that the privacy concerns are getting just handwaved. Good look trying to combine this with GDPR.
Can we just wait with this whole discussion then till the shuffling is implemented before we go to drastic steps which endanger the network more than what it prevents? If this is implemented are most dangers then eliminated anyway?
Beside that âthe communityâ so far seems to be a handful of people who demand full public doxxing while the whole node provider community clearly doesnât want their private information in a public directory. Seems like most would be okay to go through KYC via a 3rd party (for gen1 again).
Sounds like youâre very much out of the loop. I would suggest:
No, itâs pointless if we canât get the foundations right (which is what this current movement is about)
Iâm aware of all this and not at all out of the loop. Iâm following all developments quite closely.
Again what would be the real risk here? How would someone manage to get his 5 nodes voted in replacing current nodes? IF that is somehow managed what is the risk? Is it just halting a subnet? The whole Solana Network halted several times in the past and it didnât result in much damage. This would be only a single subnet.
If someone goes to all this length to halt a subnet he gets banned with all his nodes over 5 node provider entities and the nodes get replaced by other node providers.
So even if the super unlikely scenario somehow happens the damage would be limited and the threat actor eliminated.
This all sounds like a totally theoretical approach to a very low probability scenario and the proposed measures wouldnât even prevent a real bad actor. It just gives the false feeling of security since something was done to prevent the theoretical threat.
Beside all these theoretical thought processes there was not a single downtime of a subnet because of the mentioned problems. Why is there after 4+ years of the IC running now a desire to change the fundamentals of the whole system esp. retroactive? There were few forum posts with allegations and not a single one of these was withstanding little bit scrutiny. I could perhaps understand if the process gets improved for new onboarded nodes. But forcing current node providers who onboarded under a specific set of rules and have long term commitments to absolutely insane privacy violations shouldnât even be entertained. I can clearly tell you that most will just refuse to doxx publicly UBOs and CEOs. Perhaps you personally donât care about privacy but it is a fundamental right and it was once a core pillar of the whole crypto movement. Itâs quite sad to see this fully undermined in this context.
Again this literally tries to set up a banking style compliance department. Banks do this in order to fulfill government regulations and its very costly. Now some community members want to implement government style surveillance willingly on a web3 project? But thatâs not all: They also want the collected data to be made public. Like mentioned in my first post perhaps take a few steps back and realize whatâs demanded here.