Named Neuron Proposal - Always Votes

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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