Named Neuron Proposal - Always Votes

Named Neuron Proposal - Always Votes

Introducing the first neuron that will vote independently on all proposal types except exchange rate proposals.

Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/alwaysvotes_xyz

Website: http://alwaysvotes.xyz/ (tip: On mobile hold you phone sideways)

Edit: this FAQ is not accurate anymore I will change the neuron name and voting policy to Always Reject for it’s lifetime

Neuron Id: 12890113924500239096

Long term voting promise

Will vote on every proposal so you get the maximum staking rewards.

Current voting policy

  • Reject every proposal besides exchange rate proposals
  • Announce any change in voting policy at least a month in advance
  • Publish a post mortem in case “always votes” fails to vote on a proposal

Purpose

  • Make the signal that the NNS provides less noisy by filtering out people with voter apathy. With a neuron that always rejects a bigger percentage who voted accept truly meant it or trusted their named neuron.
  • A protest vote for people who don’t feel properly represented by the current governance system.
  • Offer a way in the future to default reject proposals except for the proposals that you care about

This is the short summary. If you would like a more extensive FAQ please go to http://alwaysvotes.xyz/.

I will create a named neuron proposal in the coming week, but if you would already like to follow me this neuron is already working and you can follow 12890113924500239096 manually. Happy to take any questions.

EDIT

Based on feedback I will change the name to “Always Reject” and make that the long term voting promise. I’ll update the FAQ to reflect this at a later time and leave the original one up for now.

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If your neuron is following two neurons and they vote differently, then your neuron will vote to reject. That’s how the NNS following works today.

In order to vote to Approve, greater than 50% of your Followees must vote to Approve
In order to vote to Reject, 50% or more of your Followees must vote to Reject

This plan does not work if a Followee neuron decides to abstain. When your neuron has 3 followees, if 1 votes yes, 1 votes no, and 1 abstains, then your neuron will abstain.

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I thought you needed more than 50% happy to update the post if I’m wrong!

Edit:

Looks like you are right:

if 2 * no >= followees.len() {
                return Vote::No;
}

Will remove that usecase from the FAQ and forum post

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I actually like this a lot.

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« Always vote “reject” » would be an accurate name for your neuron. In the case you keep « always vote », people are misled. So if you really want to genuinely offer to people the possibility of choosing such a protest vote, you have to announce it clearly : « always vote “reject” ».

« Alway vote » is not necessarily a protest vote, it just sounds like « don’t miss a reward ». However, people have to know they will not always only vote, but vote « reject ». Otherwise, you will carry people who don’t want to alway protest, but only always vote. This is why it is misleading : people have to be warned about what they are really choosing.

So if you want to be consistent with your purpose, describe the whole thing in the name of the neuron.

The question is : do you really want to offer the possibility of a protest vote to people (which can be respectable), or do you just want to be followed by them ? In the case where your purpose is pure of self interest, I don’t have any doubt about the fact that you will choose to rebrand it with the accurate name.

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I will vote no to the this proposal for the following reasons:

  1. the neuron name is designed to attract passive voters who do no research, yet the neuron intent is not aligned with the long term best interest of the IC. I find the name to be misleading.
  2. a strategic intent of this neuron is to attract disgruntled seed investors. There could be a lot of voting power associated with these neurons if this strategy is successful.
  3. it will be easy for people to think they are making a smart decision by following two neurons…a public neuron they trust AND the Always Votes neuron. A neuron configured this way will indeed always vote NO regardless of how their other trusted neuron votes.
  4. there is nothing preventing the owner of Always Votes from voting NO immediately after a proposal is submitted to the NNS (within minutes or seconds) due to the programmatic intent of how this neuron voting will work. Once the Always Votes neuron vote is cast it will be impossible for followers to vote manually because their neuron will have already voted.
  5. In the future, it will be necessary for individual proposal topics to be separated from the All Topics category in order to achieve decentralization. I think disgruntled seed investors and new people who have no interest in anything except following a neuron that will “Always Vote” are the most likely people to configure every single proposal topic to follow Always Votes. If this happens, then the Always Votes neuron will have pre-populated large voting power (relative to others) on proposal topics that change the protocol as we move toward decentralization. I see this as a potentially major security risk to the IC.

While I would very much like there to be a lot of choices in the NNS dApp, this Always Votes proposal seems like too much risk.

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@Always_Votes i am still torn on your proposal. I respect and approve of your attempt to provide a “protest vote” for individuals who want to express that they are unhappy with the state of the network. If you were to dedicate your neuron to serving only that purpose, and made that clear in the name, then I would adopt.

However, I have to agree with @Roman and @wpb that too many followers could be misled given your current choice of name. I would prefer something like “Protest Vote - Always Reject”.

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It’s not straight forward. Should just be “always reject”

Is Always Reject good enough? The intent of this neuron is to Always Reject All Proposals Including Protocol Updates…

The person behind this proposal could easily start over with a new name and a new statement of policy and get a named neuron passed. Nobody has any knowledge or control of how the neuron is configured except the owner. So they could call themselves Always Votes Yes and then configure to automatically vote No on all protocol proposals.

The only concrete data that the governing body can use to approve or reject a named neuron proposal is the name of the neuron and the social media credibility of whoever claims to be behind the proposal. It’s even possible to use someone else’s name who has social credit as a cover for someone nefarious who controls the named neuron. That’s why it is important for the neuron ID to be posted in the forum deliberation before the NNS proposal is submitted. When they do, it enables a few of us to validate social media identity and call attention to any discrepancies.

At least so far the named neurons that have submitted proposals are known personalities in the community. This Always Votes neuron has a completely new and completely anonymous person behind it. Perhaps that should be a good reason to reject no matter what the name.

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I will vote against this named neuron. I don’t see how this benefit the IC and act in a way to increase the value of ICP.

In the same manner I would vote against admitting a named neuron that proposed to always vote yes.

Why are we turning the NNS into a circus?

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Response to Roman

I’m happy to make changes based on feedback but don’t try to make it seem like I’m trying to trick people with the current name and approach. I was very explicit on these points in my FAQ on https://alwaysvotes.xyz/ but I can repeat them again here:

There is a difference between the stated long term voting promise and the current voting policy.

I only want to put things in the long term voting promise that will stay true for the entire lifetime of the neuron.

The current voting policy only indicates how the neuron is voting right now. I wrote stated that it might change in the future based on community feedback.

I also clearly stated that the neuron had multiple goals. The protest function was one which people could express through voting on non motion proposals. The other was getting noise out of the signal on motion proposals.

”In the case where your purpose is pure of self interest”

Which self interest is this serving exactly? I don’t gain anything out of this. It simply rejects every vote. I’m not going to vote yes on anything even when it is in my self interest. If I did that the vote could be socially nullified as it was against the voting policy.

I only lost money and time on this so far setting up the neurons, cron job, and trying to do a proper write up of my voting policy.

Handing over voting power to a proper DAO is even more work for me. Changing it to simply always reject makes life far easier for me so consider it done.

I also did a quick scan through your comment history to see if you have build any cool things on the IC. Instead I saw you are a member of ICPCM! It would have been nice for you to mention that bias.

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Response to wpb

Wow I’m absolutely flabbergasted. @wpb the champion of governance and important member of ICPMN immediately says he would vote no after I put in all this effort instead of having a conversation.

You gladly welcomed “Crypto Is Good” whose voting policy was to “follow ICDevs except on proposals that I care about” because he had the philosophy that everybody should be able to create a neuron. You welcomed every new proposal since then.

His policy seems way more passive then setting up two neurons, writing up some code, and writing up a clear FAQ of exactly how I will vote. He even indicated that he is a champion for the passive staker.

The neuron name is designed to attract passive voters who do no research, yet the neuron intent is not aligned with the long term best interest of the IC. I find the name to be misleading.”

Please don’t try to paint me as misleading. The name “Always Votes” does exactly what it says, It always votes. If somebody truly signs up for the NNS sees “Always Votes” and only needs that to make a decision then yes I want to filter those people out.

That is one of the main points of this neuron. To to get the noise of passive followers out of the system. You just don’t want that because the noise is currently pointed at ICPMN! If you truly cared about governance you would want as many thoughtful followers as possible.

”A strategic intent of this neuron is to attract disgruntled seed investors. There could be a lot of voting power associated with these neurons if this strategy is successful.”

I’m not targeting seed investors at all! I just mentioned Arthur’s article as an example of huge amounts of voting power not caring about the current form of governance. I’m there for anybody who doesn’t care. Seed investors are already getting maximum voting rewards by following ICPMN. If they were to switch over to me it would be an active governance decision to not follow ICPMN anymore not passive.

For non motion proposals they are following the foundation so again that would be an active decision. If you are against them following me you are against active participation, the passive thing to do would be to keep following ICPMN and just collect those rewards.

”there is nothing preventing the owner of Always Votes from voting NO immediately after a proposal is submitted to the NNS (within minutes or seconds) due to the programmatic intent of how this neuron voting will work. Once the Always Votes neuron vote is cast it will be impossible for followers to vote manually because their neuron will have already voted”

I stated that initially I won’t give people a promise to be able to vote themselves. And that it could become a set time of the day later. People are free to choose themselves if they are fine with that or can choose somebody else otherwise.

You can see a timestamp of the vote in the dashboard

In the future, it will be necessary for individual proposal topics to be separated from the All Topics category in order to achieve decentralization. I think disgruntled seed investors and new people who have no interest in anything except following a neuron that will “Always Vote” are the most likely people to configure every single proposal topic to follow Always Votes. If this happens, then the Always Votes neuron will have pre-populated large voting power (relative to others) on proposal topics that change the protocol as we move toward decentralization. I see this as a potentially major security risk to the IC.”

Now you are just completely speculating on how future upgrades to the NNS will look like you don’t decide that. As if seed investors who are disgruntled suddenly don’t have a long term interest in the value of their ICP anymore. If we throw that assumption out of the window we should do away with the whole NNS as it currently works.

”Nobody has any knowledge or control of how the neuron is configured except the owner. So they could call themselves Always Votes Yes and then configure to automatically vote No on all protocol proposals.”

What? This makes absolutely no sense. If I create a named neuron called “Always Votes Yes” and and then always vote No you could easily see that in your votes and the dashboard. The whole premise is that the voting policy is so simple that it can be verified by just the votes. Something easily seen in the NNS dapp or dashboard.

”The only concrete data that the governing body can use to approve or reject a named neuron proposal is the name of the neuron and the social media credibility of whoever claims to be behind the proposal. It’s even possible to use someone else’s name who has social credit as a cover for someone nefarious who controls the named neuron. That’s why it is important for the neuron ID to be posted in the forum deliberation before the NNS proposal is submitted.”

Again this makes absolutely no sense. I’m not using anybody’s name here I created a brand new one. I now have two clear social outlets in the forum and twitter as well as a website. I did post my neuron ID here and on the website. On that website I explicitly state to not vote on a proposal until for “Always Votes” until I tweet about it.

This Always Votes neuron has a completely new and completely anonymous person behind it. Perhaps that should be a good reason to reject no matter what the name.”

Anonymity is one of the core values of crypto. Spinner cash won the hackathon. ICP Maximalist is anonymous! This guy could be easily lying about who he is, you didn’t raise any issues there.


Motion proposals are meaningless to the protocol! It only serves as an indicator for the foundation to implement the actual code changes. Having careless voting power follow ICPMN is far more dangerous than having it follow “always reject”.

If I tried to sneakily vote yes on a motion proposal that says “query calls should always return poop emojis” everybody would just ignore it, unfollow me and nothing would happen.

This is in stark contrast to how ICPMN works where members could be bought by some hedgefund to sway a vote and then the foundation could consider it as a mandate by the community.

I’m really not going to get any meaningful following on non motion proposals if you have any believe at all in the long term incentives in play. These proposals are currently accepted with about 99% yes votes and basically only my neuron voting against.

It is ridiculous that currently named neurons with a vested interest to maintain their voting power get to decide over adding new named neurons. It was all well and good until somebody shows up with actual political differences over the role passive stakers should play.

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It’s already a bit of a circus I’m trying to filter out the clowns

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I consider this deliberation to be the conversation. Your proposal as you have presented it will cause me to vote no. I don’t think you gave a sufficient rebuttal to most of my points. Being anonymous and having social credibility are different. Many people in the IC ecosystem are anonymous while still being known to the community. Your neuron name is misleading even if it is accurate and your intended policy strikes me as one that could be a security risk, especially in the long term.

I recognize that you clearly know the ecosystem and the participants in the ecosystem. You seem very familiar with ICP governance and current events. It seems probable that you are known in the community by whatever identity you normally use. I don’t understand why you chose a new anonymous identity to pursue this proposal, but you are certainly free to make that choice. It doesn’t help persuade me to vote for your proposal.

This part is my reflection on named neurons and what might influence my votes going forward. I didn’t intend to imply you are using anyone else’s name or hiding your neuron ID. Your proposal has cause me to think about named neurons in slightly different ways. I was wondering where my limit would be on when I would vote no and apparently you helped me find it.

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I don’t think going after me strengthens your case brother. I’m pretty active in the community, governance and fully doxed. Everyone knows what I’m about

@Always_Votes
I did not see this update you made to the original post until just now. I will take a closer look at your proposal and website with fresh eyes when you get it updated.

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Thank you for your answer.

Simply gain more voting power and having more influence thanks to the liquid democracy, which can be a purpose per se, but also a purpose to have a direct impact on governance : ICP allows a 51% attack for very few boxes, as you don’t have to stake a lot of ICP to have a lot of power, thanks to the liquid democracy. But having influence because people chose to follow you knowing explicitly what they are following, and having influence because people were misled (also* by themselves if they decide to follow without looking more detailed informations) by is different.

This information is crystal clear for anyone having been in the ecosystem for a while or for anyone interested in following ICPMN, so your discover is a discover for you ; and I don’t really get which bias are you talking about, but among these bias, let me give one to you :

As a member of the ICPMN Neuron and as someone being here since may 2021 and interested in the governance of IC since the same date, I can say you that very few people will read this, as very few people will read your message or even this forum, so “repeat them again here” will still be not enough. As you are obviously wanting to become an actor of governance (I don’t have any problem with this of course, on the contrary), let me warn you that the main part of followers just want to follow – to not miss a reward, as you understood it – and won’t look for detailed informations. So, a lot of people won’t go beyond the name of your neuron and this name is not specific enough if you choose to take a verb as part of the name of your neuron, specifically when it is a verb linked to economic incentives. This is why I was talking about a name modification. But, obviously, you are free to choose this name.

*Still, on an ethical level, in my humble opinion : Every followees have to act knowing that very few people will read the “terms and conditions”, and not take advantage of this economy of thought. This is why @wpb repeat a lot the informations about ICPMN in a maximum of channels : twitter, telegram, forum, etc. to not mislead people, even when the intention of mislead them is not among our intentions. And any followee which would say : “they were able to find the informations, they just did not look for it” would be dishonest or not skilled enough, because it is clear that the main part of the people don’t read the terms and conditions. Being a followee means : go beyond the lack of will or the lack of time of the followers, so, again, repeat the conditions here is not enough.

Anyway, again, thank you for your answer.

Maybe you don’t consider it like building or even valuable (as you oppose “build any cool things” and “be a member of ICPMN”), but to me, participate to the IC governance shaping, even if it was just by talking on this forum with one of the brightest spirits of our generation, is invaluable.

EDIT : @ysyms, by his question, is proving my point :

He is an intensive reader of the forum, a very active member of the IC, and even a reader of this topic. In one word : he is not a regular staker ; he is a staker particularly interested in IC ; still he did not see your link toward your policy document, then you understand that attach your policy document is not enough for regular stakers’ awareness.

PS : to be clear, I don’t suspect you of being a nefarious actor. One of the persons I respect the more in the ecosystem : @LightningLad91, told you that your initiative could have an utility, but my point is only about semantics aspects : your neuron’s name is not enough accurate. If “always reject” is not accurate either in your opinion, because you want to be able to change your vote’s orientation, maybe “always protests”, “always protest votes” or “always votes protesting” is a solution.

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Can you guarantee a down vote on every proposal?? Can it be considered cheating on the staker if you vote up by mistake?If you make a mistake, should we remove your neuron from the public neuron list?I’ve tried downvoting each proposal using a C++ program, but I can’t guarantee it will always work.

Repsonse to @wpb

I don’t understand why you chose a new anonymous identity to pursue this proposal, but you are certainly free to make that choice. It doesn’t help persuade me to vote for your proposal.”

Anonimity is key to preventing a 5 dollar wrench attack. If I had created a neuron where the policy was to trust me based on my personality and involvement so far I would have to reveal it. But the policy is so simple (conceptually not the time and effort I put in it) that that isn’t necessary. You know exactly what you are getting with this neuron even if you don’t know or like me.

The key issue here is that current named neurons get to decide over new ones. We can keep repeating that people can still choose to vote themselves, but we know that that just isn’t the reality. Especially if we are actually going to get hundreds of named neurons proposals.

Thank you for reconsidering with fresh eyes when I update the FAQ

Response to @cryptoisgood

I don’t think going after me strengthens your case brother. I’m pretty active in the community, governance and fully doxed. Everyone knows what I’m about”

I really don’t mean to go after you on a personal level. You spreading the word about the IC is highly appreciated. I just meant to highlight that the effort put into the neuron wasn’t that high and that was actually one of the key points of your neuron. That everybody should be able to make one! I don’t know if I agreed with that at the time, but the NNS did and the bar has been set.

Response to @Roman

“because it is clear that the main part of the people don’t read the terms and conditions.”

I actually fully agree with this point which is why I already decided to take your feedback and turn it into a simple Always Reject which will stay true for it’s lifetime. There really couldn’t be a more clear promise in the title of the neuron. If anybody chooses to follow it they know exactly what they are getting and we shouldn’t try to make peoples decisions for them by rejecting form the named neuron list.

But this is exactly the point of this neuron! There is a lot of uninformed voting power which needs to go somewhere. If you buy some stock simply because you like it you are not forced to vote on every minutia of running the company to get your dividend.

On the IC we force this uninformed voting power to participate and take it as gospel when making decisions. We should just talk to key builders and ask them what they want offline before making proposals.

I don’t want to get any influence with this neuron I want to give people who don’t understand the IC at all to still have an outlet to participate.

The theoretical design of being long term incentivised in the protocol clearly still doesn’t work. There is tragedy of the commons at play where your personal stake is not just not a big enough motivation to put in any effort.

Response to @ysyms

In it’s current form I can’t, I could get hacked. But I think this should maybe be should possible by removing all the keys from my Internet Identity and having a voting blackholed canister as the hotkey. This seems like far too much effort at this point though when I’m not even sure I will get a meaningful following.

But motion proposals are meaningless for the protocol. If I were to every vote yes people could just ignore it. Surely you are not including a yes vote from Always Reject in the results. These motion proposals are very much a social agreement. And yes definitely remove me from the list if I break that promise.

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Btw I also don’t think we should set a precedent of rejecting programmatic neurons because they encourage passive staking.

There could be other interesting programatic neurons in the future. E.g a policy of “I will reject when 10% of the NNS rejects” because you already consider that a too large minority opposition for a proposal to go through.

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