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

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.

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.

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To be honest, I’m not pessimistic about IC governance. I just think we are all learning as we go and I hope this proposal will add new clarity. As the saying goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Decentralization will take time.

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Good to hear. You are an example of resilience and patience. I need to learn this part from you.
I do not mind that decentralization takes time. But until then, saying people vote count or saying IC is decentralized is only a show, as stated by @justmythoughts and I totally agree
Transparency should not take time though. Transparency is the least we deserve.

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Hi all, apologies that I did not provide any feedback from the side of DFINITY yet.

The feedback requires further syndication (and some people are out currently out). I hope that we can provide feedback by end of today.

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Hi all, as promised, here is the feedback from DFINITY on this motion proposal

We understand the background of the proposal

We appreciate the constructive inputs by the community. We all share the same vision on bringing the IC forward and acknowledge that different participants have different priorities. We are grateful for having such an active community and a lively discussion about roadmap priorities.

Why we are voting no

As outlined in this earlier blog post, the NNS controls the IC but not community members working on the IC. Hence we believe that the NNS should not be used, for example, to propose other community entities perform off-chain actions.

As a side comment, we remark that proposal 55651 (Periodic confirmation) requires further design enhancements, because in its current form it does not allow to execute quickly urgent updates as outlined here.

How we suggest to proceed

We are fully committed to working with the community on a holistic spam prevention and voting enhancements after the major release of the SNS and suggest doing this in a new technical working group on governance.

Given the intense discussions on governance topics in the forum, we may have missed to emphasize all the non-governance work the R&D team is working on. For transparency, we note that only a small fraction of our R&D works on governance.

We intend to share further details on the DFINITY roadmap and a detailed breakdown of our R&D capacity in the next Global R&D meeting on July 27th. In addition, we will share further information about joint initiatives like technical working groups and community-led engagements. This meeting will be made public and participants can register here.

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Whats the difference between “the community wants this feature” and “the community wants this feature to be prioritized”? We can add features, but have no voice in how soon we think they should be implemented?

How will these enhancements be decided upon? Another proposal? Why haven’t concerns been raised sooner by Dfinity? Dfinity even voted yes on it.

If that’s how things will have to go in the future then just get rid of governance entirely, have proposals be submitted as code changes, so we know exactly whats going to be implemented and vote on it, if it passes its immediately implemented, otherwise back to the drawing board. Adding features to a wishlist unaware on how and when they’ll be implemented seems a bit redundant.

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The last couple of days there’s been some action in this thread with respect to 55651 - it’s just a bit disappointing it took as long as it did to have a discussion about DFINITY’s concerns and to have those concerns voiced at least a month after the proposal originally passed the NNS.

I think there’s definitely a solution in there that isn’t outrageously difficult or over-complicated. What would help is to understand all of the different ideas that DFINITY has brainstormed for implementation as well as the various attack vectors they have considered. Also understanding their current process for how the DFINITY neuron is controlled in order to push out hotfixes would help in designing such a feature. But until recently that more detailed context hasn’t been surfaced.

I’d be happy to collaborate in a forum type back-and-forth environment with DFINITY to help coalesce around a solution, as I’m sure the rest of the community would be happy to participate in the technical implementation design and details - I’d just want to know that DFINITY is actively thinking about actually how a proposal would be implemented, and putting a good faith effort to think through solutions for how such a feature could be implemented in a secure fashion, and to communicate those brainstormed ideas with the community so that we can help iterate on and maybe even take on implementation tasks if we have the bandwidth and technical-depth. But without communication, from the outside (not DFINITY internal) sometimes it just feels like we’re all standing around waiting for an update.

@bjoernek as for proposal 38985, which also passed with >90% of the vote back in January - have there been any concerns with or plans/ideas for implementing that proposal?

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where is the decentralization of having a proposal approved but not executed and only executes those they prefer?

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I am just posting here to have it in writing that as a seed investor I am very disappointed with the direction things are going and will vote FOR this proposal and ask for a way for us to be able to prioritize things that matter.

Focus on the tech, and not on things like that “tax improvement” proposal that has made taxes horrible for all of us (I work with an accounting firm and deal with multiple jurisdictions). At this point I am baffled by how the foundation self-sabotages the project by spending resources on things that are engineered to make things more complicated and have absolutely zero benefit and do the opposite of what their stated intention is. Not to mention the discord, and fighting it sows between investors and users.

On-chain governance for everything means nothing, if there is no way to enforce it and if the foundation and its friends hold the majority of votes.

Please for the love of all that is holy. Stop self-sabotaging your project.

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It’s time to expand the ICP network. I think tax optimizations are a waste of time. If someone has to pay taxes, that’s their business, not DFINITY’s business.

Edit: And also it is not fair to evaluate “manual voting” and “voting by following” the same.

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I read their voting guideline again. One item read:
About the IC and In the interest of the IC - The proposal should be about the IC and of interest to the IC.
Programming to tweaking maturity to try avoiding taxes in some jusrisdiction is certainly NOT of the interest to the IC

So they don’t even follow their own guideline.

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