Discussion about governance in ICON

General Discussion
#21

Ok as someone as part of a chain’s process of decentralization and following up with most of the chains.

First of all, decentralization means inefficiency but also letting it all on the system is wrong. Manny system failed. I will give some examples. I didn’t want to name chains directly but most people can know how it goes.

Chain was successful at the beginning then people keep voting on dapps dapps sold to Foundation. Right now more than 50% controlled by a single entity. It might be close to +80% but I didn’t pay attention that much to that part. The issue is if dapps from small teams are gaining all the votes. It’s possible they acquired by big entities. Which happened with some other chain very recently. They came from outside and take over the chain.

About bounding for avoiding selling or skin in the game approach. It’s first of all very negative approach for decentralization and implementing after decentralization will just make entities not backed by companies etc will not try to get in so In long term whole chain filled with companies also some people with enough investment. On one of the chains, the guy who runs it had a traffic accident and jailed. A lot of stakers coins and generated coin stuck on that account.

Filling it with companies also issue. Companies drive for profit which can lead to cartelization even if not in the long run it’s not beneficial enough for the chain.

Now on community teams, Team delivers a 20k USD worth of product and they spend 2k per month every month community saw that and support them they become top 3-5 on that chain they are here over years but since then they just keeping their developed program up which is server cost and maintenance. With all of these extensive rewards, they started to become validators for other chains by just putting their investment in because they were rewarded a lot while their spending is minimal.

In any way, we can’t just fix this issue with just decreasing or increasing irep values even tho main issue is vote concentration on top. Anyway, my suggestion is like vote by preps banning a team we need a function which half of prep rewards and cutting prep teams reward to 0 for a period. With these functions, if a team not doing anything and just claiming their rewards by a vote of preps they can lose 50% or 100% of their rewards till they provide something and again by vote they will keep receiving rewards again. If they don’t I don’t see a point they keep their investment in while they are not getting any reward they might consider voting for other preps which is unlikely. That’s my suggestion without some control over it by human factors. We can’t be successful and become the same as other chains in the long run. That’s why we need active control and this way we can have it in a decentralized way. If people are not happy with the result and how these handled they can also change their votes accordingly since it will be public

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P-Rep Community Meeting Topics - March 7, 2020
#22

The purpose of governance is to run a clean node for Icon.

#23

I believe your suggestion could eventually lead exactly to what happened with steemit. When you say “Once rules are agreed upon”, how do you propose that these rules will be agreed upon?

I dont think that majority of coins should represent what community wants when it comes to creating rules because a few % of wallets have the majority of coins. It also opens a room for exchanges do what they did today. Regardless if they now offer staking or not, if there is a vote that they see they can take advantage they could coordinate a similar attack.They lock user funds unannounced and vote for which proposal will benefit them the most.

I do agree with you that we are not at the point of technology being able to run entire organizations without human intervention. But i believe this should be done by Icon Foundation for some more time instead of preps based on the coins they have.

Just because i believe icon should lead the way for some more time, doesnt mean that preps should just sit back and watch, they should keep discussing and voicing their opinions just like youre doing know, it will help the foundation to understand different points of view.

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#24

Just wanted to comment: I wish more P-Rep teams were participating in this conversation. One of the most significant reasons we never make any headway on any topic, is because only two or three people have the conversation. And the other 110 are silent.

Then it just fizzles.

This is partially why we decided to start having meetings. But even there, some of the biggest players in the top 22 don’t even bother to show up. We haven’t even broken 9 teams out of 100, participating yet.

For the most part there’s a solid couple handfuls of teams that engage overall, but even in conversations like this, it dwindles down to just a couple. I’m not sure how we can govern when everyone’s afraid to express their opinions.

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#25

I totally agree with the importance of the participation of every P-Rep or to be a little more real about it, at least 30% of them, this is imperative, but I would put the reason of this not happening not on fear but on a mix of not following the channels to keep up with the discussions and total disinterest in these type of discussions.

I know this is just an opinion and maybe I shouldn’t say it, but it seems like a big percentage of the P-REP’s are just content running a node, getting rewards and leaving all the governance into the hands of the fundation, and the fundation is doing a great job but if we truly want to achieve decentralization, P-Reps need to be more involve.

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#26

I am trying to participate for our team hours are hard to schedule since our 2 members are in +3 GMT timezone. I was ill last week and meeting didn’t happen this week but main point is getting everyone on the meeting is not possible also expecting everyone to show up in first meeting also not reasonable. I think +30% is successful number for that in the long run.

#27

Governance of a decentralized network should be unbiased, predictable, programmable, and enforceable. This is not the same as “rules” that are created in a centralized environment where authority having jurisdiction become the judge/police to enforce the rule.

Many P-Reps are too busy building and won’t have time to become the enforcer; nor it should be part of their job, especially in a decentralized environment. While I’m against vote buying, I don’t think it’s possible to implement via a protocol that is unbiased, predictable, programmable, and enforceable. Bitcoin doesn’t have enforcers working on the side to manage with voting buying or miner poaching.

Governance should focus on blocks production efficiency, unstake period, I-rep, P-Rep bond requirement, rewards, etc.

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#28

I have just stumbled across this discussion through the Telegram group.

Governance of a decentralized network should be unbiased, predictable, programmable, and enforceable. This is not the same as “rules” that are created in a centralized environment where authority having jurisdiction become the judge/police to enforce the rule.

Many P-Reps are too busy building and won’t have time to become the enforcer; nor it should be part of their job, especially in a decentralized environment.

This recent comment I 110% agree with.

Let’s specifically pick this part.

Governance should focus on blocks production efficiency, unstake period, I-rep, P-Rep bond requirement, rewards, etc

I highlighted “rewards” here.
Let’s take the discussion of “vote-buying” from Telegram right now here as an example.
In all honesty, I can’t be bothered to spend my team’s time to effectively have jury duty over single events leading to a public stoning, that will repeat themselves no matter what rules are being applied.

What we are more than happy to do is working on (quote on quote) “unbiased, predictable, programmable, and enforceable […] rules”.

Staying with the same example. I don’t need a piece of paper that is saying “vote-buying is not tolerated as agreed on by the wise P-Reps on the day of eternal sunshine”. Effectively, this is not enforceable.
A programmable solution for the event of “vote-buying” would be to change reward payouts purely based on delegated stake to a measurement of contribution. However this rule can be implemented would be part of a governance discussion.

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#29

Appreciate the comment. How would you propose rewards based on contribution measurements be implemented as a rule in an unbiased, predictable, programmable, and enforceable manner? You mention that a programmable solution for vote buying is to change reward payouts to a measurement of contribution. How can this be done in an automated and predictable manner, without bias?

#30

Thank you for commenting. I can appreciate this perspective. I definitely see benefits to your perspective, but I do not agree it is the best policy to take. I understand that rules will cause some inefficiency. However, I believe the benefits of a few well thought-out and agreed upon rules are worth the time it will take but I do appreciate the counter perspective of keeping everything 100% decentralized and simple. I think that would change what the yellow paper discussed in DPoC to be more like traditional DPoS though.

#31

I believe that many people are missing the point that @thelionshire is trying to make.

Currently there are teams doing things that are frowned upon like for example vote buying, but even after the fundation publicly stated that they do not want vote buying and we should not be doing it, teams still keep doing it.

@thelionshire is not recommending for us all to become judges and executioners, he is simply stating we are seeing teams doing things they should not do, how can we stop this before it gets out of control, let’s talk about that not wait for it to become so big of a problem that we cannot control it.

We are suppose to follow these:

And I understand that development based teams are busy, but we all are also busy too and taking the time to discuss this is part of our duties also.

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#32

I do see @thelionshire POV but what I’m arguing here that it is not enforceable. Please prove me wrong and provide examples on how you can enforce against “vote buying”.

Resources are limited. Even if @thelionshire has the best interest, I cannot be for certain that his team will have the best interest for my team and other teams. We should continue building and focus on increase the network transaction, for example.

Teams like ICX Australia, Blockheads Development, and HypoIcon were expose to “vote buying” and look where they are at now. Obviously not in the top 22.

I don’t think teams in the top 22 are risking their reputation to “vote buying”, which means the effect of “vote buying” have very small impact on ICON’s governance.

We all should have “builders” mindset and not “eaters” mindset. We can all win together by building together. “Eaters” are scare someone will take their pieces of the pie. “Builders” we know we can build more pies.

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#33

I know what is the subject here but my suggestion is on much wider governance issue. Vote buying is not the only issue as I give examples we can become centralized by entities buying out validators exchanges taking over and many more. Which we can see all over existing chains only way I can see out of it is active governance by preps. If there is a way to avoid it all by code automation some genius finds a way for it I support that all the way but as of now that’s not the case.

#34

We are in builders mindset cost us %80 of our votes thankfully we don’t spend much since we are sub prep so we can cover the extra hire for developments. We expect that and didn’t see that as a big issue but we hope to see support with our product releases or we will forced to be dormant.

#35

I’m unclear as to ICONs current formal position re Velic offering staking without lockup. Would very much appreciate a clarification.

Next point is if it’s deemed alright for Velic to do so, does the Foundation also think it’s acceptable that binance stakes with their cold wallet. Their 100+ million ICX coins would mess with our governance massively.

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#36

I agree that the the effects of vote buying are small at the moment but part of this conversation is to be proactive and talk about it, currently as we stand we are not prepared or have the tools and processes in place to guard or protect ourselves from entities with a lot of money to take over, more over so when right now is very profitable to just spin a node self vote a lot of icx and get 18% annually.

the idea of this project is to create communities with people that recognize the potential of the project and are willing to work for the improvement of it.

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#37

This is the point that I believe we need to discuss.

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#38

Yes. There’s are 2 folds ICON Foundation can address right away.

  1. Publicly condemn Velic’s staving practice. Staving creates an unfair plane field for other hard working P-Reps. In addition, if the Foundation does not send a strong message against “Staving”, other future exchanges can use the same strategy to “buy” voters. Also, this encourage similar “vote buying” schemes from other P-Reps. If Velic is unwilling to change their “Staving” practice, maybe we can reduce the unstake period to 2-3 days.

I found this article very useful:

  1. Encourage voters to spread their votes so in case of an attack, it will be hard for an entity to take over the network. For example, 1) Display non-top 20 teams on the voting list, 2) distribute a minimum of 250k (could be a different #) to all P-Reps between 23 and 100 using the Foundation holdings.
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#39

Although I complete agree that these are immediate actions that can and need to be taken (or at least considered) by the fundation, I feel that they are only temporally solutions to a problem that could become bigger in the future.

The Fundation is doing a great job, but your solution would still make us dependants on the fundation taking actions for every decision and that’s not decentralize at all.

I would propose to implement what you are saying to take care of the current situation with Velic but to also find a way to allow us to make these types of decision in the future along side with the fundation.

#40

Respectfully,

  • The purpose of governance is to run a clean node for Icon.

  • The purpose of a PREP is to positively support and grow Icon (Many ways this can be done).

  • In the future we will advance to highly reward contributions.

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