I rarely comment here, but I’m probably reaching the wrong audience on Twitter, so I’ll give it a go.
Tradable neurons mean we own our neurons.
Web 3.0 = Own
So either we own the asset or the ICP blockchain is not a Web 3.0 protocol.
We keep trying to overcomplicate the neuron marketplace when, in fact, it actually helps defend the network as being Web 3.0.
Hey IDGeeks great job developing this marketplace. Very cool concept.
Any plans of developing a bribery marketplace which would allow neuron holders to rent out their voting power for individual proposals? I think that would be a interesting idea. In this marketplace neuron holders would retain ownership of their neurons but would instead rent them out temporarily for a price. Similar to the convex liquidity bribery for curve pools.
Voting power has a nonzero value. In the future, it will be more economically efficient for someone seeking to amass voting power to simply bribe other neurons rather then buying their neuron outright.
If we want to prevent large amount of voting power from being controlled by individual entities the best thing we can do for now would be Removing neuron following from NNS in order to force people to vote for themselves and prevent a few neurons from amassing large percentage of voting power. @alexeychirkov
saying there’s no skin in the game just isn’t true and I’ve explained this above… if you buy a neuron you are still paying liquid ICP for locked ICP and therefore have skin in the game! So either you don’t understand how the market will work or you’re being disingenuous…
saying that tradable neurons is bad is an opinion unless you can demonstrate with evidence…and you can’t! And in my opinion trying to steal people’s staking/voting rewards IS bad for this chain.
why are you still talking about immutability?! Your views on immutability are irrelevant and apparently mutable! Immutable neuron ownership seems be the only thing you believe it…even though you’re completely fine with changing the “contract” terms under which people stake.
Also, this whole debate is already settled because guess what…we currently have tradable neurons!
Finally, two last points… 1) if you think that some retail investor selling their 100 ICP neuron is going subvert the democracy you’re not being serious, and 2) if you think a large institutional investor is going to be stopped and/or use an app to do this you also aren’t being serious
The biggest risk to this chain is named neurons who actually don’t have any skin in the game and the politics associated with them.
@mechaquan you would be much more persuasive if you would stop trying to belittle or trivialize the arguments made by others. Your ad hominem attacks and straw man arguments are turning you into background noise, but you are capable of so much more. Personally, I have grown tired of trying to engage you in a discussion specifically because of this behavior. This forum thread is replete with examples.
From my view (not DFINTY), the main security risks are:
In the short term
Constant threats (long/short term):
Why make it so complicated? In blockchain, there is information about which neuron voted when and for what. You can buy votes without this marketplace. The neuron voted as needed, and the principal received the payment. And there is no need for any complicated schemes with transferring neurons. Or you can simply follow specific neuron and receive a reward.
Hey Wenzel! Great job taking my non ad hominem attacks out of context! Sorry sarcasm doesn’t come across great via text…
Btw, every time you’ve engaged with me recently it’s not been via debate but rather commenting on my discussions with someone else…so…
Do you have any arguments to add to this debate or are you going to merely be some spectator who snipes from the sidelines?! If not, it seems you are more interested in attacking my character… good luck with that.
Finally, I’m not trying to persuade anyone… I genuinely don’t care… I have no intention of selling my neurons but I do plan on continuously calling out ridiculous arguments that are false.
Have a great day/night!
Couldn’t a large company just buy ICP and stake to perform a hostile takeover?!
They wouldn’t need to necessarily buy neurons… the problem you explain exists regardless of neurons being tradable, right?!
Also, for the amount of ICP/VP needed to significantly sway a vote it would be time/cost consuming to find enough neuron sellers to affect a particular vote IMO.
- saying there’s no skin in the game just isn’t true and I’ve explained this above… if you buy a neuron you are still paying liquid ICP for locked ICP and therefore have skin in the game! So either you don’t understand how the market will work or you’re being disingenuous…
I haven’t ever said that the new owner doesn’t have skin in the game(Although if the second owner also has an out then they have less skin in the game than an owner who has no out). I’ve argued that the previous owner has a pathway to less skin in the game than would have otherwise been there and that requiring maximum skin in the game by everyone leads to better long-term collective wisdom of the crowd decisions making.
- saying that tradable neurons is bad is an opinion unless you can demonstrate with evidence…and you can’t! And in my opinion trying to steal people’s staking/voting rewards IS bad for this chain.
Damn it mechquan…you’re going to make me write an agent-based model that demonstrates that I’m right. I think you’re being obtuse as I don’t think that this a hard concept to grasp if the idea of governance has any merit whatsoever(and if it doesn’t, fine…lets manage the network differently…but a different debate).
In the meantime, here are some psychological papers that demonstrate how longer-term time horizons lead to better decision-making:
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1992-97809-000
I particularly love this one “Tying Odysseus to the Mast”… which demonstrates an 81% performance improvement for commiters: https://ashrafnava.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/tyingodysseus_qje.pdf
There is an entire field of study on this called “Commitment Devices.”
If these aren’t enough evidence for you I’ll try to argue from the absurd side by saying that if we don’t think that long-term time commitments to outcomes are effective, then what the hell are we even doing here? If we do think they are effective, then there is some asymptote that is approached as the time commitment increases. If you offer an out, you are picking a place further away from the potential maximum.
Do we want to be on the left side of this graph?
why are you still talking about immutability?! Your views on immutability are irrelevant and apparently mutable! Immutable neuron ownership seems be the only thing you believe it…even though you’re completely fine with changing the “contract” terms under which people stake.
I’ve ceded that we should make any changes on a go-forward basis(unless there is an imminent short-term threat). If I could go back to the recalc of rewards I’d propose that it only affect future neurons and/or offer all neurons an unlock. Norms are important and I did not expect the blowback that a vocal corner of the community had. You guys make some good points and I think going forward we should be more thoughtful on how changes are rolled out.
If we add something like a zk signature of consistent personhood in the future, I’d propose that it only apply to future neurons and/or future staked maturity.
The majority of ICP and voting power is locked up, with age bonus multipliers. There isn’t enough liquid ICP to perform a hostile takeover at this moment.
Allowing neurons to be tradable through a marketplace makes a hostile takeover a potential reality that the foundation and community need to take seriously.
Thing is you need a way to reliably verify a certain principal actually owns a specific neuron and that isn’t quite possible right now afaik.
The only way would be to ask the neuron owner to top up the stake with an tiny random amount, but it is a bit cumbersome and has to be done with every neuron, which is why nobody has done 8 year only airdrops yet, trustless neuron transfer automates this process and generally makes selling VP to different entities way easier for users.
I second this 
Also I would like to add to this discussion by taking a glance at Plato’s analogy of the cave. To be more specific I would like to focus on the shadow in the cave.
The shadows, be it by light coming from the candle or the light from outside the cave, still, is a shadow in the cave. To my understanding, Plato’s vision was to divert the vision of people from focusing on the candle and get their vision outside the cave to maximize their exploratory naturalistic human instincts. However once people have been in a cave for ages they might not want to leave the cave for better shadow figures that might exist out of the cave.
My focus being shadows; I want to clarify on some of the ideas raised above by @skilesare. Though someone can argue that both shadows be it from the candle or the sun are the same they actually are not. It is the same concept as trying to explain what makes the grass green is it chlorophyll or the wavelength of light that reaches human eyes.
The candle and the sun emit light at different wavelengths; but are the shadows the same? Is the shadow the absence of the emitted light or the collusion of the light once it hits the object?
Bringing these analogies to the topic in discussion, are tradable neurons the same before and after they are sold? Or should they be striped of their voting power once they get to the marketplace? What is the purpose of creating a neuron market place?
I would like to argue that the neurons after being traded are not the same anymore! Just like the shadow from a candle is not the same as the shadow from the sun. They should be of a secondary class…and not hold as much weight as the primary staked neurons.
To add on a
Neurons that are traded should have a punishable mechanism! ; which is that they do not have voting power!
This is to safeguard the longevity of the network 
Careful… Wenzel might write a post about your ad hominem attacks! Just kidding we know his observations are one sided.
Unfortunately, I think you’re being naive because nothing is going to stop large ICP holders from being able to sell large neurons and they won’t use an app to do it.
Good luck trying to punish people who do…
It would take 100s of millions of dollars to buy enough neurons or ICP to perform a hostile takeover without even considering the price action that would ensue.
Huge sales or transfer of ownership don’t happen on a marketplace. They happen in boardrooms.
So I don’t think a marketplace for trading sub 1k ICP neurons would/could be a bad thing.
Pretty much buying all or enough voting power to control the network.
The theory is this will become increasingly expensive as we hit supply shock. The price of ICP and therefore neurons would become exponentially expensive.
This is why most of the time there’s an offer made to the board (for example Elon with Twitter)…for a decentralized network someone could make a proposal with an offer.
I think it would be very difficult…my concern is it would be far easier and less expensive for a few large named neurons to collude as they have much less risk… or skin in the game compared to their VP.
When will this feature get released?
Take over the Internet who be laughin to the bank
Lay low make another one make ‘em go insane
Save on the bird but he was beggin’ the fedz
Flyin’ to the desert he wa still beggin for the cake
Lost couple Bill$ word on the street he ain’t recover yet
I agree that there is very little incentive for named neurons to behave rationally. This should be a way for voters to provoke themselves, even if their name neuron has already voted as long as the voting window is still open, just in case one of them go rogue.
Also wanting to know
Would be cool if Dfinity just enabled people to unlock instantly for a slash/fee which is determined by staking length, and then burnt thereby reducing the supply
You have totally my support.
Its not new that skilesare and wpb are in favor for redirecting peoples rewards to their own interest or " pay devs", not a surprise they want to prevent people from gtfo from the narrative they try to implement.
Following screenshot already illustrate peoples positions ( feel free to find more obvious one )
So yeah, could they POSSIBLY BE BIASED ? They didn’t even answer your argument properly because they know you are right. Even Manu personally think that this Market isnt an security issue. So yeah its about $$
