Proposal to Prioritize 55651 (Periodic Confirmation) & 38985 (Manual Voting) over 48623 (Compounding Maturity)

Governance
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Proposal co-sponsors: @justmythoughts, @wpb, @Zane

Proposal

We propose that DFINITY implement proposals 55651 - Periodic Confirmation of Neuron Followees and 38985 - Enable Manual Voting throughout the Entire Voting Period before implementing proposal 48623 - Compounding Maturity Proposal.


Prioritizing Decentralization of the IC over Tax Optimization

A very important driver for wanting to prioritize proposals 55651 and 38985 over 48623 is that they will have a bigger impact on the decentralization of the IC. Proposal 55651 seeks to ensure that voting rewards are distributed to neurons whose owners meet a minimum standard of active participation, which is simply to confirm their Followee selections every 6 months, instead of neurons that were configured by default to follow DFINITY at genesis. Proposal 38985 seeks to allow all neurons owners to vote manually at any time during the Voting Period even if their Followee(s) has already voted. Both of these proposals are directly aligned with the ethos of active and decentralized NNS governance and the purpose of the tokenomics incentives. Proposal 48623 seeks to help neuron owners avoid incurring a tax burden. In the process of addressing this issue, the changes will also add a lot of new voting power to the NNS from ICP that is currently sitting in large genesis neurons as maturity and it will influence ICP price with the modulation function. These are not the primary objectives of NNS governance and tokenomics incentives. Hence, prioritization of proposals 55651 and 38985 over proposal 48623 seems to be more closely aligned with governance objectives at this time.


Background

Over the past year, the NNS voting community has passed many proposals related to the NNS, including:

Dashboard NNS Proposal Links - (Note the % are out of those who voted, not total staked voting power)


Even though Compounding Maturity Proposal was, and still is one of the most controversial and close governance proposal votes to pass the NNS (51% approval vs. 49% reject), the DFINITY foundation has chosen to prioritize and deliver this proposal first.

Adding on, the @jwiegley, the original DFINITY engineer who was put in charge of the original Compounding Maturity Proposal, has since left DFINITY and publicly come out against the implementation of this proposal on the developer forums.


Why should I pass this as a voter, isn’t this micromanagement?

First off, no organization, team, or employee works well being micro-managed, and most NNS voters believe in the vision and capability of DFINITY to deliver on their roadmap, as they have proven the ability to do so (good job DFINITY! :tada: ).

However, when a proposal driven and passed by the voters passes the NNS, there is some expectation that this proposal is eventually worked on, but there is currently no mechanism or guarantee that DFINITY will actually implement that proposal.

What voters see right now is that the Compounding Maturity proposal, which was the top priority of the head of DFINITY, is being prioritized in front of other proposals that passed earlier and with much higher approval. In fact, those other proposals have not even been given places on the roadmap.

In fact, 7 out of all 8 of @dominicwilliams replies on these forums until now have been with respect to the Compounding Maturity Proposal Profile - dominicwilliams - Internet Computer Developer Forum


If the implementation of proposals passed by the NNS is truly just dependent on “top down C-suite level management”, and decision making that puts their own priorities first over those of the voters, it actually shows that the NNS is not decentralized. In fact, all this shows that we are all operating under the facade of a decentralized vote.

This has even larger implications in the value of your ICP as a governance token - is it just worth the compute cycles from burning, or does your voting power actually matter? Can your vote actually drive DFINITY to implement and deliver any proposal, especially one that passed the NNS 6 months ago by a wide approval margin?


What we’re asking the governing body

This will not be something that we in the community expect the voters to do often. We don’t want to push DFINITY to context switch on a whim, or to micro-manage them as stated before → that would kill innovation and their vision.

In this case, we’re asking voters in the community to push back on the internal prioritization of a highly controversial proposal, criticized by its original implementer, that barely passed the NNS, and has been dictated and driven by a single person from the very start.

We’re asking voters to publicly say that they want DFINITY to take proposals that the IC governing body has passed convincingly, and to prioritize that work in the DFINITY roadmap.

We’re asking voters to publicly push DFINITY to take the following into account when they prioritize proposals:

  • The chronological order in which they were passed

  • The approval percentage associated with the NNS vote

  • The backwards-compatibility of the change, and the friction/pushback that it would cause within the community.


Timeline

  • (1 week) Community reviews comments, asks questions, provides actionable feedback
  • Community votes to accept or reject the proposal
11 Likes
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Hasn’t the compounding maturity proposal already been implemented?

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Part of it has, but it’s my understanding it’s not yet complete:

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John just added some context to proposal 48623:

1. Since my disagreement was not moral, but merely technical, I had no issue with implementing it against my objections. As a principal engineer working in that area of the product, it was my responsibility to execute the designs of my CTO and CEO.
2. The opinion I formed is that the community is very divided on this matter, and so DFINITY should proceed with caution.
3. No, I did not have that authority. I was able to give feedback on the design at all levels, but the executive decision was not in my hands.

Dfinity have voted NO to a proposal to downgrade the governance weight back to 1. The proposal did not pass as they wanted. Then, they change idea and decided to make a proposal to bring the weight down back to 1, the exact same as the one they put down before.
If they can do this, I think the proposal 48623 should be suspended and, after the implementation of those 2 proposals 55651 and 38985, we should have a new vote for proposal 48623.
It is really sad thing that someone have the job task to make a proposal that he himself qualify as a very bad idea, especially when he is an important engineer at Dfinity at the time.
Now knowing what we know now, there are huge chances proposal 48623 would have not pass, and by much.
John is someone we all trust and have a huge credibilty. He is also a gentleman and a very loyal person, thus could share his personal view at the time. I am convinced many voters have voted YES because it was proposed by John.

Just asking here if some other also think the proposal 48623 should be suspended and have a new vote later on?

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Indefinite suspension of 48623, a proposal that was already passed by the community, is not in the context of this proposal or discussion.

Yes, the co-sponsors of this proposal are aware that work on 48623 has been ongoing, as mentioned here Compounding Maturity - NNS implementation update. This proposal simply aims to ensure that 55651 & 38985 are prioritized, implemented, and delivered before continued work on 48623.

While your points are 100% valid discussion points, they should be brought up in a separate post/thread, as this proposal is more focused towards ensuring that broadly supported community passed proposals receive the same urgency and priority as those driven by the top-level executives at DFINITY.

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I agree with the response provided by @justmythoughts. This proposal is not about revisiting the merits of proposal 48623. In my mind, that proposal was properly deliberated and adopted. I am not opposed to that proposal being implemented in due time. My objective in co-sponsoring this proposal is simply to emphasize that the priority of 55651 and 38985 should be higher than 48623. Hence, I want to ensure that the scope of this proposal is not going to expand beyond our original intent.

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Thanks for clarifying. I did not realized the “before 48623” which I highly support.
I am 100% in agreement with all your proposal.

I do not have problem either with proposal 48623 with the technical. My problems with 48623 are these:
1- Was proposed by someone who taught it was a very bad idea, then misleading the community
2- Make people believing the proposal is relieving the burden of taxes
3- As everyone can see now, it makes the NNS reward system much more complicated and not attractive for new investors, then working against the initial goal of 90% of ICP being locked.

I truly understand this is another topic that should be addressed in another thread. Will see how this proposal end up first.

Thanks for everything you do, being so important, for this ecosystem.

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I think this underscores how important it is to open up the IC github repo to external contributions. That way, community members can implement the proposal themselves. I believe Internet Identity has already been opened.

Actually, can’t community members technically fork the repo, make their local changes, build the replica, and create the necessary “Update Subnet Replica Version” proposals themselves, even before the github is open to PRs?

@diegop Do you happen to know the latest on that effort?

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I’m going to vote no for this because I think we should revert anything that forces people to need to pay attention.

This is borderline stealing

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I agree with the sentiment, the reasons why I personally decided to go ahead with this proposal are 2:

  1. As much as I dislike 48623 it has been approved by the NNS, deliberating it again might end up with a different outcome but I believe it’d put us on a slippery slope, if a passed proposal can be questioned then nothing is really “approved”

  2. Even if 48623 had passed with 100% VP, it still doesn’t make sense in my opinion to prioritize it over the other NNS related pending proposals, we just had to vote on a temp fix for spam cause the NNS team didn’t have time to work on anything due to SNS taking up resouces, but for some reason 48623, which was proposed by Dom coincidentally, can be worked on despite not providing any significant benefits to the governance system. Furthermore I believe Dfinity has provided conflicting infos on the matter as you can read in my post:
    Compounding Maturity - NNS implementation update - #14 by Zane

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So asking stakers to press a button every couple months is stealing, but taking away a % of my maturity due to circumastances outside my control and which already impact me negatively is fine?

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This is exactly what Dfinity just did with the governance weight. The first proposal did not pass (they voted No) and they submitted a new one last week to reverse the rejected proposal. So they have proven that a pass proposal is never really approved.

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Why would you not want people to pay attention? The whole point of the tokenomics is to incentivize people to pay attention and participate in governance. Anyone who DYOR on NNS governance and ICP tokenomics before they create a neuron will know this expectation.

Community leaders really should be careful about characterizing tokenomics changes as stealing. It can leave false impressions to new participants in our governance system. The NNS is intentionally designed to be mutable and people who create neurons need to know and understand this fact.

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@diegop @bjoernek

I think DFINITY has always done a great job of explaining why the organization votes for or against governance proposals. In this particular case, no matter which way the foundation votes, will you please clarify in your response how community led proposals that are Adopted will be prioritized and resourced for implementation by DFINITY?

If case DFINITY is evolving to believe that they should not be responsible for implementation of community led proposals, which I think can be a reasonable outcome, then will you please provide guidance that helps the community understand how to submit proposals that include code that will be implemented if they are Adopted? This would be similar to how instructions were provided for how to submit a governance proposal late last year. I hope there is a step in that process in which DFINITY will perform a code review to validate that community generated code changes are safe for release. I think this would be a big step to helping the community understand expectations. We are all learning together and your clarification on this matter would be greatly appreciated.

Also, we were very intentional about trying to comply with the Voting Guidelines that have been communicated to the community in the past about what will elicit a YES vote from the Foundation. Hopefully you will agree that this proposal has an on-chain focus and is tangible, achievable, and about the IC and in the interest of the IC. Hence, if there are other reasons to vote against this proposal then I think we would all like to learn more so we can take it into consideration in the future.

Thank you so much for your help!

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@alejandrade I think the main difference here is when people buy shares of stock in a company they know what they’re buying into - centralized control and direction. If they don’t like the direction, they can vote with their shares and/or sell.

The IC community sells decentralization, but is not decentralized in any way - from the node providers, to the boundary nodes, to updates to the replica - the decentralized protocol is just controlled by a single authority and not the voters. I believe we can get there eventually, but that might be at least 2-3 years out.

DFINITY employees do an amazing job of listening to the back and forth of many different viewpoints on the forums and take our concerns into account, I have nothing but positive things to say about all of the patient hardworking folks at DFINITY, especially with all the crap we say on the forums (@diegop you are a saint) - but for any significant new feature, the community has not been able to convince DFINITY (or at least the C-suite) that a passed proposal is worth being put on the roadmap.

It’s a hard pill to swallow, realizing that I locked up my ICP in a neuron thinking my voting power would actually matter. It doesn’t matter though - governance votes are simply a show for the community with no actual forcing function.

All that really matters are the votes on updates to the replica - many of which pass with 99%+ approval ratings as everyone’s neurons are default following DFINITY.

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This proposal has been submitted to the NNS (proposal 72189) since the deliberation has gone quiet. It also has the benefit of being submitted while the proposal weight for Governance is still 20. DFINITY indicated earlier today that the proposal weight will reduce to 1 tomorrow when they implement the tactical fix for spam (proposal 70015). Since this proposal is aligned with the original intent of proposal weights, which is to encourage active participation in governance, it seemed fitting to submit this proposal before the proposal weights are reverted.

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I’m all for prioritizing decentralization over taxes… Even if it means my taxes become more confusing, and complicated, or it creates a separate income event. I’m happy to “do my part” in either direction. However, if someone could take the time to work with me to understand which way their vote is being cast and why… I would truly appreciate it, and my voting power could potentially be used more adequately/ abstain from this vote if I feel necessary. Not that my voting power would really sway a vote but like I said I’m just willing to do my part.

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Absolutely nothing prove that proposal 48623 will give you a tax relief. It was only a Dfinity assumption, without any tax firm advice. Although it was asked to contact 1 or 2 reputable tax firm, they ignored the demand. Don’t ask me why. Probably afraid of the answer. In fact, if you stand on their side and the tax man decide clearly otherwise, you mey get in some tax trouble. Seeking a tax advisor is the best thing to do, beforere relying on proposal 48623. Only my humble opinion. I have been involved with the tax of many countries before but I am not a tax advisor.

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So, I’m not concerned about it creating a substantial tax burden personally. If my rewards act as income, at my current position I won’t move out of my current tax bracket unless it boosts my salary by 50k a year which I don’t see happening anytime soon.

I just want to understand the process for my own understanding. I am going to be seeking a tax expert this season 100%. I’m not standing on their side or anyone’s for that matter… I am just trying to cast my vote more accurately.

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Thank you for all this work. Sad to see that Dfinity didn’t even acknowledge the concern of your previous post and have ignored it completely. To me, they seems to follow order from up above, like seen with the initiator of proposal 48623 was doing. Concerns are growing more and more among the community, from previous heavy IC promoter, and with good reasons.
I have deleted the rest of this post. Useless.

EDIT: I think Internet Computer is 99% a huge and impressive success. I also think the IC decentralize governance is a huge fail. DAO is quiet a new concept and maybe DAO will just not work.

1 Like