Motion Request for Neuron Indexing

Governance
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41

can you elaborate a bit around the internal discusssion of @rossberg points made earlier?

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42
  1. I believe it to be true that every neuron has a unique id, although I would need Dfinity to veridy this.
  2. I know of no way to tie a neuron id to its ownersā€™ Principle ID for neurons created after Genesis. For Genesis neurons, I believe it is possible because I remember seeing them tied together on ic.rocks.
  3. This is correct as far as I know. However a createdOn datetime is recorded when a neuron is created. I wonder if itā€™s possible to use that datetime and the ICP transaction history to figure out the account number feeding the ICP to the new neuronā€¦ seems like that might be possible.
  4. Currently the governance canister contains the voting history for recent proposals for each neuron. You can see this on the governance tab of the ICA dashboard (also accessible via the API for the dashboard). Of course, this is only true for known neuron ids (which is mostly genesis neurons)
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43

Probably a conversation for another day, but i think theres a good argument that recent voting history should be mandatory public. It would allow anyone to conduct a ā€œrecountā€ of any recent proposal and provide a second verification beyond the nns code audit. The real life example would be the equivalent of allowing hand recounts in democratic elections where the vote tally is close or there is reasonable doubt regarding the operation of a voting machine.

I think there are steps we could take to both protect privacy of neuron holders and increase transparency of neurons themselves.

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44

Yeah, thatā€™s a good point. I do hope there is further discussion on these ideas.

45

I thought DFINITY was going to abstain from voting on governance proposals. DFINITY and the ICA have been voting on multiple governance proposals recently. What has changed? Did DFINITY/ICA announce this change?

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46

The foundation considers a motion proposal by the community a mandate to work on a topic and feed that topic into the roadmap process. As part of that process, a topic is first scoped, meaning it is investigated what the topic actually entails and how it can be realised. Part of that scoping is a conversion on this forum and then eventually another motion proposal to agree on the scope. We are preparing a blog post on how the foundation aims to manage the roadmap and how to work with the community on the roadmap and individual features such as working groups etc. So please bear with us for a bit for a better answer. Thanks!

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47

A blog post in the the works on this.

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48

This is great, thank you. Iā€™m glad the foundation is thinking about these things.

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49

Iā€™ve summed up my concerns that surfaced from engaging with this proposal: Formalization of proposals process

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50

Agree that transparency / equal access to this information is needed.

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51

@diegop @Kyle_Langham

The work youā€™ve done producing visibility into DFINITY neurons and voting power is amazing, and I want to thank you for this.

Any update on how or when this Neuron Indexing Proposal work (which passed last month on the NNS) might fit into the DFINITY roadmap for the next few quarters?

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52

Hi all, (for context, I am a researcher in the NNS team)

Please know that this feature is on the NNS team todo list.
As we are at the last mile of the SNS feature, which is the big feature scheduled for the Carbon milestone, the NNS team is focused on shipping the SNS. We might thus only get to the neuron list afterwards.
I hope that makes sense. Please let us know if you have more questions!

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53

No worries on my partā€¦ I believe the SNS is a more important priority.

The new neuron charts on the dashboard (and the governance canister capturing that data) provides a lot of value in the meantime.

Thanks for the update!

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54

I want to bring up the importance of this feature, as I believe that both:

  1. The release of all investor, seed and team neuron addresses (without doxxing individuals)
  2. Adding neuron indexing

would dispel much of the concerns around decentralization and what happened at genesis.

To be fair, we are now at 9 months since the ā€œSNS last mileā€ described above.

I understand this is a hard feature to prioritize, but recent events such as the Twitter space and public critiques have highlighted the lack of transparency around historical neuron data that is publicly accessible.

If the DFINITY team is too busy/priorities are elsewhere, maybe someone close to the code can outline a rough set features required to implement neuron indexing.

Also, Iā€™d happily chip in some ICP or time to make this happen.

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55

Thanks for raising and pointing out the importance of this again @justmythoughts.
We will consider this in the next roadmap planning!

56

Hi @lara, I wanted to check in on this feature and if thereā€™s any appetite/bandwidth to implement it in 2024.

Iā€™ve started a poll as an informal check-in to see where people are now at almost 2 years after the passing of the initial governance proposal.

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57

Hi @justmythoughts and thanks for tagging!

We donā€™t have a complete plan for the whole year yet so I canā€™t make concrete promise, but indeed we currently think that this is something that we would like to tackle this year as it has come up in different contexts.

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58

Just one list will not suffice. Itā€™s necessary to preserve all neuron votes in a manner similar to the transactions of ICRC1 SNS tokens with archive canisters. It would also be beneficial to record the time when a neuron cast its vote. Additionally, for a comprehensive understanding of the vote distribution, a list of followings would be helpful. In any event, this information will be indirectly accessible, provided thereā€™s a list of neurons and their voting times.

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59

@alexander Since youā€™re super passionate about this subject I thought youā€™d be a good person to ask about this. Iā€™ve been doing some reading about things like MACI(https://maci.pse.dev/) that attempt to combat collusion in the opposite way of transparency by making it impossible to even prove your own vote.

Can you give the pros and cons of the two approaches and how the IC setup may change some of the assumptions of the MACI maxis? Iā€™m for transparency in a liquid democracy set up because I think it helps keep the power brokers in check and accountable, but does the transparency make them bribeable? In some ways? (Maybe not the problem we have now, but does correcting for one open up the possibility of the other?) These are all open questions and I only have limited understanding of all the dynamics at work.

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