One step at the time!
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This is such a good post. So many of the P-Reps suck so badly, but sadly there isn’t really much we can do about it. It’s laughable that the community has asked for Trezor support since 2018; voters have poured millions of $ to P-Reps, yet no one has taken the initiative to do it. If someone just paid a developer a fraction of that amount, it’d probably be done in months if not weeks. The Trezor example is just one of so many examples how P-reps have failed to give back to their voters.
The problem with decentralization is that everyone “owns” ICON. When everyone owns something, then really no one really owns it. So many free riders and P-reps who are all talk.
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Sadly as far as I understand it Trezor won’t accept ICON integration because ICX is outside the top 30 market cap coins. Terrible service from them for our Trezor users
Do you know many others who want support, could put together a joint petition/request?
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I realized that centralization was an issue quite early, just weeks after the “decentralization phase”. The issue is that P-reps recieve rewards for shilling themselves on social media. Actual honest P-reps are lost in the noise while the lowest quality P-reps (With a few exceptions thanks to whales in particular) generally gets a place in the top 22.
I suggested that P-reps who are in the top 22 gets the same rewards and compete for hashrate - instead of competing for votes, similar to Bitcoin. Why? Because that’s their job. Their job is to ensure the network security, so that’s what they should aim to do.
The current system rewards the P-reps who are most active on social media, which is extremely problematic because most ICONists doesn’t seem to understand what they’ve invested into, which leads to them voting on whichever P-rep is most attention-grabbing. Very few P-reps have actually built exciting ideas the time that I have been around, so what are they actually being compensated for? Why did the DBP program get removed anyways? That was my main motivation to ever build something that ACTUALLY uses blockchain and isn’t built around it like all these tools we so. I don’t have the aspiration to ask for money via grants - but would rather get rewarded for creating transactions On-Chain.
Feel free to read the initial post (although it could have been made more clear):
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There are a few good points in this thread but there are some that aren’t so good as well.
- Some Iconists are placing their blame in the wrong areas. Don’t hate the players, hate the game. Anyone that is pissed at a team for getting the votes they got is misplacing their anger. It’s like being mad at an athlete that got overpaid by a team. Why would you get mad at the player for taking the money the team agreed to pay him? Should you be upset with the player or the system that pays the player? The foundation is working on making changes to the system so all of this is a bit ridiculous to me.
I think we all wanted bigger, more professional p-reps to jump in and take the top spots but who’s fault is it that this never happened? Ubik or Icon’s? It’s certainly not ****** (name removed - let’s just say any particular P-Rep’s) fault, right? They signed up to compete in consensus, did their thing, got their votes and here we are. It’s not like they’ve done anything illegal or played outside of the rules.
- An election is a competition. People are mad at **** for doing well in this competition? Really? We’re sitting here pointing fingers at **** instead of the system and voters again.
Let’s look at mineable for example. He doesn’t develop anything but he makes the best videos for icon. As a result, people vote for him. Iconists are saying they value the mineable team’s efforts more than blockmove, who does awesome stuff on the development side. Should we be mad at Mineable for taking the votes and making the money? No. He’s just doing his thing and is earning the rewards that come to him through the system ICON created and ICON is trying to “fix”.
Additionally, some of the teams with less votes that think they should be ranked higher don’t seem to be doing anything about improving their vote totals. Again, this is a competition so to earn more votes they have to compete. If you have a basketball game and one team is crushing it from 3 point land (imagine 3 pointers are being active on social media) and is winning and the other team doesn’t like shooting 3 pointers, you don’t just change the rules of the game and say no more 3 pointers allowed so the team that is behind can catch up. No - the team that is losing needs to accept that they need to start hitting some 3 pointers. In this case that means the teams that are behind need to start doing some of the stuff that gets votes.
- I think if people keep trashing some of the community teams like **** that they will eventually stop working hard to promote icon. I see ubik on top of the list of promoting icon like every week. If the foundation and people in the community keep shitting on them they’ll probably stop putting in that effort. People think **** pocketing a bunch of money (which we dont even know to be true for sure) has this big effect on price. Ubik’s yearly rewards are like a tiny percent of DAILY trading volume so that’s just kind of crazy to me how much that seems to be blown out of proportion.
Just a few things to think about…
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That’s the thing. U know why this is the problem? I have already mentioned it above.
"stagnant vote is caused by the lack of clear criterias to evaluate P-Reps. You see there are more than 70-80 P-Reps. Voters hold a ton of other coins other than ICX. They won’t spend days going on about to research which P-Reps are good or bad. They would just put it all on ICON Foundation to be safe, or the top few on the basis that they think the top few are good if not they won’t be at the top.
That’s why I mentioned we need clear evaluation model on P-Reps. So the Founders have to first decide what criterias they want to set for ICON. Then based performance metrics on those KPI goals. If not it is really all over the place as we are seeing right now.
WE NEED TO CREATE A SELF-SERVING MECHANISM THAT WORKS LIKE AN INDEX which automatically filters out only the top few P-Reps based on clearly thought of KPI. I don’t understand why you guys don’t get it? That is the problem just like in this forum.
FULL OF TALKS AND BULLSHIT. BUT NOTHING GETS DONE OR IMPLEMENTED!
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I already proposed an excellent solution but i don’t know why people just don’t get it. It is just a simple idea that works. You guys just want to make things complicated.
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Welcome to crypto.
Is this “problem” limited to Ubik or ICON? Not even close.
I really don’t know what the internal members are doing. I mean the problem is pretty CLEAR as shit to me. We could get this right and we could solve it. But I guess Nope.
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This is literally the first time that I see that Ubik is mentioned in the thread.
Can we please take the preemptive prep defense/offense to the specific TG channels or simply make a thread of your own for that purpose - this is a thread for a general system improvement proposal
Fixed. Fair call.
I replaced their name with **** and said we can just add any P-rep’s name in place of it.
My solution;
- Monthly bad prep governance vote
- preps require to justify what they’ve done with months revenue with contributions.
If the contributions don’t meet rewards they’re DQ from the ecosystem.
If preps earn enough just to cover node costs that’s enough contribution to keep network decentralized.
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No self staking preps with 0 contribution. They can vote preps with actual contribution. No need to double dip rewards.
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Preps who cannot perform to the task are automatically DQ and ongoing rewards are seized straight away.
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Clear quarterly progress reports are required.
As a prep; you have a responsibility not only to run a node; but to contribute to the overall ecosystem. Marketing, development, public support. Whatever it is… the amount of money you earn, needs to be put to good use.
I have no issues with preps paying themselves wages. But I have a issue with preps paying themselves AND doing absolutely nothing.
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We hear you. Please have a look at our proposal where we want to work on the solution
We share a lot of opinion stated there. Instead of endless talks we want to work on the solution [GRANT] ICON Hub - Contribution metrics
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You could introduce a vote against option. This will allow iconists that are aware of PREP contribution to compensate for those that are less active and vote without doing any research. Rewards are calculated using number of votes - votes against and the rest sent to CPF.
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Maybe the system should stop giving hand-outs all together? Only pay for the costs of the node + a little profit for taking the time to run it. But if you really want to get paid for your work show us what value you’ve created/delivered for ICON and after that do some sort of vote and if the majority of the top 22 agrees you get paid?
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You could also force voters when voting to rate the PREPs from 1 to 10 on some categories like the following 1. dapp development 2. Tools/infrastructure 3. Marketing(this may force voters to do some research on PREPs). These categories can be weighted by PREPs or voters once a month. For example it is decided by vote that the direction should be 50% dapp development, 40% tools and 10% marketing. Then calculate the mean of voting results to calculate rewards. For example PREP X will have a mean of 9, 4, 1 (from voting results on the 3 categories). Then he will receive only 50% x 9 + 40 % x 4 + 10 % × 1 = 6.2 so only 62% of rewards an the rest sent to CPF or redistributed somehow to other PREPs with higher means. In this scenario I can vote for PREPs I like and also use 1 vote do bring down the mean of a PREP I consider is receiving unjustified rewards (a more refined way of voting against)
@BennyOptions_LL since this seems to be a hot topic would love if you could do an interview with @ICONPLUS on current and future improvements of the economic and incentive model and how you see this working if ICX goes to an absurd value of 100usd let’s say
No self staking preps with 0 contribution. They can vote preps with actual contribution. No need to double dip rewards.
I would suggest the exact opposite.
Here are my thoughts on a high-level.
I would encourage self-staking. And this is how to make it work.
Your suggestion 1 “monthly bad P-Rep governance vote” also perfectly fits into this.
All we need to do is implementing slashing penalties for “bad P-Reps”, and exclude or weight votes by anyone who staked the corresponding P-Rep incl. themselves) differently.
So the way it would work, even if hypothetically “P-Rep Validator 1” holds 50% of all votes.
At the end of the month, all ICX stakers are able to vote good/bad P-Reps.
Validator = P-Rep running node
Delegator = their voter
- P-Rep Validator 1 votes good for P-Rep Validator 1
- P-Rep Delegator 1 votes good for P-Rep Validator 1
- P-Rep Validator 2 votes bad for P-Rep Validator 1
- P-Rep Delegator 2 votes bad for P-Rep Validator 1
- P-Rep Validator 3 votes bad for P-Rep Validator 1
- P-Rep Delegator 3 votes bad for P-Rep Validator 1
etc.
Now, P-Rep 1 would be voted bad. A slashing penalty would occur for Validator and Delegator.
Validator needs to be excluded for a minimum of 1 cycle and Delegators allowed to move their votes for the next cycle.
If bad P-Reps vote for themselves (which is fine imho as you are contributing to the network), they take double damage.
Now, I also understand these are fully transparent on-chain votes, and there could be a “counterattack” in the following cycle.
I have not the slightest bit of knowledge about game theory, so I might be completely wrong here. However, I believe what I just described as a “counterattack” would just not happen.
And here is why.
Nothing would devalue the token price more than a public and transparent war between Validators and their Delegators with each other. So the biggest losers would be the biggest token holders. In my example above the P-Rep and its Delegators holding 50% of all votes.
Hope that makes sense.
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Good post. But the problem is really deeper.
Actually I dont like what foundation itself is doing with its delegation programm. IMO it is disturbing governance model greatly. ICX is starting to look just like EOS.
We have one boss who gives money to whomever he likes w/o any criterea. I was following this initiative for a while. First they did it themselfes, but quickly realize what its completely not transparent. After they came out with his “community discussion” idea, which after a month recieves almost no feedback at all. So we have no idea on what basis those “additional votes” will be delivered.
And by the way - those P-Reps who applied early still have foundation votes delegated, although the programm is effectively on hold. Thus P-Reps structure is broken, we have “special” teams benefiting on expence of others. This leads towards even greater centralisation, just like in EOS. Its would be prudent to at least revoke those votes untill commutiny discussion period is finished.
One word - a mess!!!
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Actually Block.One stayed out of governance entirely and EOS became dominated by exchanges. ICON is quite the opposite of what happened on EOS, but perhaps you could show me some research that I missed.
What happened on EOS is being too hands off too fast and just letting the chips fall wherever. The community stopped caring and exchanges simply took over the network. At least that is what I heard from speaking with EOS BPs when I was researching different governance structures. What ICON is doing is more similar to what Cosmos is doing.
Having said that, I would say the delegation program has pros and cons, that’s why it’s a pilot program and that’s why structure changes from month to month. Decentralization is a process, not an on/off switch.
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