Your stated goal with voting against ICDevs was to restrict the ways developers could fund themselves (such as the license a member of ICDevs previously wrote). ICDevs have clarified they are not intending to vote in any way with regard to that license, but you still hold it against them. Thus, you are trying to using your wealth and power to restrict how developers fundraise on the IC. That is antithetical to the libertarian ethos of crypto.
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Your first reply that explained your vote said:
We believe that this is contrary to the whole point of the IC and will vote against ICDevs until the middleware ransom code is removed and an alternative funding mechanism (perhaps none at all) is found.
Nowhere did you mention trust. Now you are moving the goalpost.
If it is trust that is the issue, can you explain why you don’t trust them and offer them a path to gain your trust?
Also once again I have no affiliation with ICDevs or it’s members. I do not know them in real life. I am judging them solely based on their activity in the community.
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This, I think, is a fair critique.
The trust factor that you alluded to in one of the previous posts is, then, directly attributable to the fact that you feel that ICDevs is getting too much recognition for too less of innovation.
I wish that we had known about this opinion from before. But better late than never. Thanks for voicing your opinion.
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I’m going to have to stand up for my Developer advisory board here. @quint has written probably >50% of the useful user generated motoko code in existence and @lastmjs’s contributions with porting databases to the IC and building a JavaScript cdk are by far some of the most significant innovations I’ve seen to date. Our other members have been active in discussion and development that continue to enable the IC to do new things. These are the people that ICDevs board has enabled to drive our budget agenda and direct the voting power of our neuron. If these folks aren’t clearing your bar then it would be helpful if you could further define where that bar for innovation is.
This statement is a significant misrepresentation of our work so far. We have not repackaged any rust code. We have not even released a rust library. None of the bounties that have been completed contain any rent-seeking code. Our bounty sizes are restricted by the donations we receive. Many of our devs who have applied see these as significant incentives for the work and an amazing opportunity to learn while getting paid. Finally, we have no licensing plan for code produced from our bounties except the most permissive open source licenses(likely MIT). In instances where we have a funded bounty or community requested bounty that requires work in software with a more restrictive license we will ask for the blessing of the Developer Advisory Board before doing so.
As far as trustworthiness and transparency goes, we’ve done everything up to and including submitting ourselves to the inspection of the US government as a 501c3 charity with public bylaws, clear formation documents, and a commitment to public discourse(our developer board discussion channel is public readable). We will keep working to advance the mission in our by laws and you will have no issue with our Dedication to the cause. Our efficacy is only limited by the donations we receive.
I’d gladly invite you and your confidants to match this transparency or it makes a conversation more difficult.
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‘@quint has written probably >50% of the useful user generated motoko code in existence and @lastmjs’s contributions with porting databases to the IC and building a JavaScript cdk are by far some of the most significant innovations I’ve seen to date.’
Have no reason to take issue with that, but perhaps that is part of the ‘issue’. My feels are that the ‘powers that be’ want community members to develop a larger ecosystem to support beginning and intermediate developers b4 they deem same to have made a contribution that evokes trust?
If it is just a small tribe that wants a big say based on the fact that they currently have the technical ‘knowledge’ …I do understand why that might not be trusted. Nothing personal. Seems fairly pratical.
Why aren’t there numerous educational resources to learn Motoko/Candid? If there had been an early investment towards that the coin would probably be several times more valued. If a group dedicated themselves to developing this and it brought a general audience into the ecosystem my feels are that this group would probably receive the ‘political’ support of the ‘powers that be’.
I own a domain, theinternetcomputer.org. Would be happy to contribute that to the community to build an ethereum.org -like platform and maybe the folks that make the most worthwhile contributions could use that as a platform to gain trust.
Just sayin’.
I have no axe to grind nor dragon to slay and no ego to serve, but I do believe in the promise of the Internet Computer to empower individuals.
For folks that have never started their own company or made the money they want to in this world I understand that pro bono work for the greater good might generate skepticism. Am sure there will be plenty of fame and fortune to go around eventually. I just want to bring a 1000 …10,000 fresh faces through the door from all walks of life by making this more accessible.
Would also think that this would serve your desire to be recognized and rewarded with support from the ‘powers that be’.
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This is an interesting question! Work on motoko continued at a good club behind a bit of a curtain right up until May when the IC launched. I know I had a bit of an expectation of more robust base libraries being available. It is still really hard to do some basic things in motoko. It was part of the drive to create an org like ICDevs.
That is a great domain name! We have a open bounty to add content to https://tutorials.ICDevs.org. User @efe is currently assigned to the bounty but there is no reason anyone can’t create a pull request with some tutorials beyond the basic scope in the bounty: ICDevs.org Bounty 1 - Basic Tutorial and Site
If it is just a small tribe that wants a big say based on the fact that they currently have the technical ‘knowledge’ …I do bunderstand why that might not be trusted. Nothing personal. Seems fairly pratical.
It seems a bit of a chicken or egg problem. In a young community who gets the trust and how do you build it? On the IC, today it seems that is right place right time + disposable income. You have to start somewhere, but to claim that the “trust” up and down the line on the NNS is based on something but financial ability + luck would be a hard case to make. That is the trustless nature of the system. The community can trust that these folks behind the curtain have the systems best interests at heart because they are locked up for 8 years. It doesn’t mean they are right or will make the right choice and the liquid democracy component is there to diffuse some of that responsibility responsibly by delegating votes to experts. I’d argue that one of the axis of expertise that people would want available to them is technical expertise.
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“We” as in the seed bros chilling in the discord? You have such a massive amount of voting power and use it to reject a motion proposal citing - we don’t like money flow to centralized authority and their rent-seeking behavior.
Seems like this “discord” group is a more centralized component of ICP that has massive voting power. Let me ask you How ICMPN and CycleDAO are more decentralized entities than IC Devs? Not seeking rent? that’s the only parameter?
ps: I have no affiliation with any of them, it was exactly this situation I was predicting about and It happened.
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I doubt if cultural issues were at the heart of the ‘no’ votes by villa-straylight’s group of whales, but since the American focus of IC Devs was mentioned at one point, I am placing on record my own feeling of uneasiness with regard to IC Devs as opposed to CycleDAO. When I look at the CycleDAO website, I see a group fairly diverse in nationality, who have boosted the ICP ecosystem as individuals and have come together to help it as a collective. When I do the same for IC Devs, I see a website filled with requests for donations, donations, donations, and a meagre list of bounties handed out. It doesn’t convey the feeling of an organisation that has done much for the ecosystem. This kind of website for a non-profit might be something that Americans are used to and consider appropriate, but it did put me off considerably. If the response is that IC Devs hasn’t done much yet but has great plans for the future, I think it is appropriate to wait till a few of those plans fructify before giving it such substantial voting power.
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Not correct, that would be true for copyleft licenses like GPL, the MIT license allows the use in closed proprietary software.
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I think this whole saga demonstrates that a few whales unfortunately have too much power on the IC today.
Without having a strong opinion on the matter at hand, it does appear that a minority of folks have squashed the will of the majority. Oligarchy at play.
Let’s see if people parties help to fix. I do find it ironic indeed that the whales behind the no vote were worried that IC_Devs would have too much power haha.
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Disclaimer: Personal Opinion
ICDevs requested the “reject” voters come forward and voice their opinion. They came forward and let their concerns known.
If they own the governance tokens (ICP) and they decided to vote to “reject”, that’s their right. If ICDevs goes on to contribute further and the token owners change their mind, they’ll vote “accept” if ICDevs puts up a proposal again
But attacking the token owners for their reasons will just DISCOURAGE future “reject” voters to come forward and participate in discourse.
They own the governance tokens to decide and they have the most at stake if “not enough decentralization” leads to a failure of the network.
My 2 cents
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This is probably* true, but isn’t that how the NNS was designed to work? The NNS provides greater voting power to individuals and groups that make larger commitments to the network. At the same time, it allows anyone (even those with small amounts of money) to acquire voting power through liquid democracy. So it’s not intended to be a 1 neuron = 1 vote system.
It seems to me like we’re only upset with these whales because they voted against the “majority” opinion. Would we still be upset if these same whales voted in favor of the proposal? Would we be able to get any votes passed without the participation of seed investors?
I agree with @saikatdas0790. Instead of focusing on the voting power held by these stakeholders we should be focused on finding common ground. But we can’t do that if we discourage “reject” voters from coming forward.
‘*’ - I only say “probably” because we really don’t know how many individuals are represented by a single neuron.
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This is exactly how it is supposed to work. Some people will have more voting powers than others. They will have differing opinions. It is important to know the real reason (which was elucidated after more discussion) so that either we agree or agree to disagree or somewhere in between. We can also have different philosophical mindsets (i.e. GPL vs MIT licenses vs not respecting licenses at all).
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Personally, I’m upset about the centralized distribution of voting power not because of this particular vote, but be because it undermines the entire project. Take censorship. A core selling point put forward by Dom and Dfinity to developers, users and investors is censorship resistance.
Speaking strictly about resistance in relation to AWS (think Parler) , banks (OnlyFans) etc the IC is censorship resistant, sure. But a handful of whales could censor from within. It would arguably be bad business for them, but the point is trust in a few hundred individuals is required.
I write “a few hundred” because I don’t know the smallest number of individuals that together reach majority voting power. Which I see as a problem in and of itself. Let me know if that number or an estimate is available. I know indexing of neurons according to type (seed, etc) has been suggested elsewhere.
Hopefully People’s parties will be used to balance out voting power. In my view it’s in the whales interests as well.
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DFINITY and the Internet Computer Community are not acknowledging the gravity of voting power centralization.
You can find information about voting power at: Internet Computer Network Status
At the time of this post, there is ~404M voting power across the NNS stakeholders. When you talk about “majority voting power” it’s important to note that there is both an absolute majority and a simple majority rule.
Achieving an absolute majority (>202M VP) would means the outcome is set in stone.
Achieving a simple majority means you’ve received at least 3% of the total voting power (~12M VP) and the voting period has ended.
As demonstrated with this proposal, achieving 3% does not necessarily mean you will win. A controversial proposal will likely see the voting period extended by the wait-for-quiet algorithm until the maximum voting period is reached. This would give plenty of time for additional votes to come in.
For a very serious topic (like censorship) I highly doubt a simple 3% majority would be all it takes.
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Thanks for the reply, but I don’t see how one could use the dashboard to answer the question. The smallest number of individuals that together have 50% voting power. Am I missing something?
We also need to keep in mind that only 13.5% of total voting power actually cast their votes on the ICDevs proposal. At most, Dfinity Foundation holds 24% of all ICP tokens and Internet Computer Association holds 4% of all ICP tokens based on the Messari report at genesis. I don’t currently know how much voting power these two organization hold, but they intentionally abstained from voting (rightly so IMHO) and there was a significant amount of voting power that were following them that did not vote. Today this is not painful for those neuron holders because missing one vote is negligible, but the push toward decentralization must also include incentives for as many neurons to vote as possible even if DF and ICA feel they need to abstain. If these incentives are significant, then I think people will follow other neurons and the voting power distribution would change accordingly. I think this is an evolution and we need to give it time. We need to keep pushing toward policies that we can agree will move us in the direction of decentralization and high voter participation.
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No, you’re right. This won’t tell you the number of individuals (referring to humans). You can do some digging to figure out the minimum number of neurons required to achieve a majority.
But like I said in my other post; we have no way of knowing if 1 neuron represents the interests of 1 human, or 10 humans. Just like we don’t know if 10 neurons are controlled by 10 humans or just 1.
We know that seed investors have one of the largest allocations so its fair to assume that the VP is not as decentralized as we like. But I don’t see how we change that in the short term. People parties will likely help but I don’t think it will be the great equalizer everyone is expecting it to be. Personally, I expect the voting power to further decentralize with time and inflation.
How grave do you think it is relative to other networks?
@Comfortable_Reply_56 seems to imply that “a few hundred” is insufficient. I wonder how many independent node operators would have to collude to censor BTC or ETH. Just doing a quick Google I found this tweet by Vitalik from 2020 that stated ETH had a nakamoto coefficient of 34. That’s a lot less than a few hundred.
Fwiw I agree that we should strive for greater decentralization but I’m having a hard time believing that the NNS is that much worse than the majority of other networks.