Discussion about governance in ICON

General Discussion
#41

To be clear from the beginning, I don’t have a definite answer or solution to this. Just writing down my thoughts.
Definitely something you would need a strong background in economics (or even tokenomics).

That being said, I want to point out what the actual issue is.
Reward payouts are purely based on delegated stake, so effectively the one and only KPI for any P-Rep to keep an eye on is simply that.
This is the root of all evil. Revenue share within the Top 22 is just free money without any cap, restrictions, or downside.

From what I understand, the only quantitative measurement of actual contribution for any P-Rep is I-Score.

So what I am seeing here is the fact that the one variable (contribution) the ICON network has barely any impact on rewards, while votes are all that is relevant.
By judging human nature, it is clear to me what this leads to.

One idea would be to put a max cap on the “Representative Reward” for everyone as this at least removes the incentive to buy votes after reaching a certain point. Still attractive to kick-start you in Top 22 though.

Another idea would be the necessarily KYC bigger stakes and P-Reps rewards are capped by addresses they are being staked from.
I am just using some arbitrary numbers without putting too much thought in it now. So let’s assume P-Rep buys 1M votes of a whale. Max cap per address is 100k ICX for P-Rep to receive rewards. KYC limit is 20k ICX. Bought votes would need to be either send to 10 KYCed addresses or 50 non-KYCed addresses. It is not a bullet-proof solution, but surely would raise the bar of difficulty to self-stake and especially vote-buying.

Another idea would be to tie proposals and dApps to rewards. There are probably a million ways to do this and a million and one way to exploit this. I don’t know how exactly (yet).

So anyways, these are just thoughts to prove the direction of what I had in mind with “programmable rules”.

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#42

Thank you for sharing. Those are some good ideas and I appreciate the discussion. What you said was high level but give me insight into what you are thinking. I agree that those types of directions are the probably best for a long-term solution, however, as you said there is still a lot of work to be done to explore what the best course of action is, and implement it. A lot of the best courses of action may not actually be possible right now, given today’s technology.

That’s why I think there should be some simple high level rules. I agree that no one wants to be a full time police or enforcer, and that’s not what I’m desiring either. Right now we have no rules. Even if the rules are hardly enforced, they would still be rules to set guidelines for what is appropriate and what is not.

I’m not sure what the rules would encompass and what the corresponding penalties would be. I have ideas, but those would need to be discussion topics with other teams that we could collaborate and agree on. The current situation is that we have no rules and the current topic should be if we should have any rules or not for P-Reps to Govern by. Maybe this is for the best that we have no rules - I just don’t think so. I don’t think we should become a bureaucracy or even have very many laws, but I do think a few simple rules would do well to help set standards of what is appropriate, and what is not - even if every case was not enforced (as many said, it’s impossible to do this).

Even if rules were never enforced and penalties were never given, I still think there would be a benefit in that it would give ICONists a sense for how P-Reps ‘should’ act, and they could vote accordingly. Right now, there are some cultural norms that have been adopted, but nothing beyond this. Perhaps this is for the best, as it allows ICONists to truly Govern and select any P-Rep without limitation. My opinion is that there should be a few rules to uphold IISS in areas that code cannot.

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