Request for Comment: Public & Private NNS Neurons

[Ajki]

@Ajki

I am asking again: Will DFINITY vote on this proposal?

So much for Dfinity not voting on governance proposals.

Proposal: 130832

Neuron: DFINITY Foundation

I must say, it’s truly disappointing how this proposal was rushed.Requests for comments were basically ignored since the majority was highly against private neurons.

[wpb]

@Ajki

So much for Dfinity not voting on governance proposals.

To be fair, DFINITY votes on the vast majority of Governance proposals. It’s not very often that they abstain. Even if they didn’t vote, the result is still very lopsided in favor of this proposal. It seems to me that the vocal opposition that commented in this thread were actually the minority opinion. This is why it is typically a good idea to take a proposal to the NNS instead of leaving it to be decided by forum discussions. You don’t really know who is in the majority until the NNS votes are cast.

[lara]

If this level of distrust is what is being addressed, could the objective be achieved with some form of cryptographic verification / Zk proving without the need to create a neuron index ?

It could be that this is possible, depending on the information reviewers are interested in.
One advantage of including the neurons’ data that doesn’t need to be private in plaintext format (not in some ZK proof) is that this is probably the easiest way for users to understand. Understanding ZK proofs requires substantial more knowledge to fully understand.

if the purpose of the neuron index is indeed to enable data intelligence practices to track down the owners of specific neurons, then this is a different matter.

I don’t think this is the goal.

[daniel-wong]

For developers, I have started a new thread regarding API changes and migration strategy for this feature.

[Lorimer]

@Manu

Do I understand correctly that you can only follow public neurons?

@lara

I think a better moment to discuss whether following should be limited to public neurons is after we have periodic confirmation and learned how this would work (which will already reset some following).

Great points raised by @Manu. Now seems like a good time to bump this conversation. At the moment there are neurons who expect their ballots to be private, yet anyone can put a trace on any neuron and record their ballot history. This can be done either covertly (without telling anyone), or overtly (making a private neuron’s ballot history public and exposing this to the world).

The current situation definitely seems misleading and prone to trip people up (private ballots aren’t really private). If we’re going to say that they are, then they should be