IISS Enhancements

[BennyOptions_LL]

Hi Everybody,

We are a few weeks into decentralization and we are now starting to see IISS in action. We can see the pros/cons of the design more clearly in practice, and I think it’s time to start bringing P-Rep teams together to think of ways to enhance IISS. While there have been some great contributions so far (and I’m sure more to come) we can all admit the design is not perfect.

I have summarized what I believe to be the current pressing issues and I present a potential short term and long term solution. Looking forward to the discussion and seeing how IISS evolves.

Problems

1.) Competition instead of collaboration. Some P-Reps have collaborated, but there is a competitive nature to this rewards design that limits synergies and incentivizes combativeness, smearing, a major focus on PR/politics, etc.

2.) Votes are too concentrated - this is a research intensive decision and many people do not put in the time/effort necessary to comfortably diversify their votes among many P-Reps.

3.) Some P-Reps have reported being extorted by voters trying to push the teams to do what they want.

4.) P-Reps at the top are getting too many rewards.

5.) Self-delegation by ICX whales is highly economical and there is no unbiased/objective/decentralized way to stop this with the current design.

6.) There is a strong economic incentive to buy votes. Although we have stifled this problem for now via political tactics, I would much prefer a solution at the protocol level.

7.) Overlap between responsibilities of a P-Rep and what will be the responsibilities/scope of an EEP.

8.) This is not decentralized enough, thus we lack some key benefits of public blockchain (immutability, security, etc.) since we are essentially 22 non-anonymous entities that could easily be shut down by authorities, collude to alter transactions, freeze accounts, etc. This is especially true considering the concentration of votes.

(I may have missed some problems - anybody feel free to add to the list if you believe I missed something)

In my opinion, the root cause of most of these problems (problems 1-6) is the competition to break into the top 22 P-Reps and, more generally, the concept of more votes = more rewards. Mitigating the benefits of receiving more votes would fix problems 1-6, although I am still considering the potential consequences of such an adjustment.

Short Term Solution

I am considering a proposal that would take the square root (or even cubed root) of the percentage of votes received prior to calculating rewards. This would help close the gap between high ranked teams and low ranked teams, but does not fix the other issues. For example, the calculation for delegation rewards (B2) if you had 9% of the vote would be:

SQRT(9) x (i_rep/2)

Longer Term Solution (When the Contribution Proposal System launches)

Separate the role of EEPs and P-Reps and make ICON more decentralized. Core responsibility of a P-Rep becomes governance and block validation, while core responsibility of EEPs is to contribute to the growth of the network via specific initiatives. Block rewards would be allocated as such at the protocol level, lowering the rewards for individual P-Reps and increasing the reward pool for Contribution Proposals. I would expect many of the current P-Reps to start forming teams that execute EEPs and build DApps on a regular basis. The larger economic incentive would switch from running a P-Rep/campaigning for votes to submitting Contribution Proposals and executing on such proposals. A key benefit here is that each individual EEP has specific goals and KPIs, thus putting the larger portion of block reward funding directly towards specific projects/initiatives rather than to the control of P-Rep teams.

i_rep would create a monthly reward pool that would be evenly divided amongst all nodes that meet the following requirements: a minimum delegation of [1M] ICX and having their node synched to within [43,120] blocks from the current block height. Block producing nodes would earn an additional [20]% for being a block producing node. All numbers here are TBD, but an example of the model with i_rep set to 2M ICX is shown below:

B1 = Reward to each main P-Rep for producing blocks
B2 = Reward pool for running a node and meeting the minimum requirements

Receiving additional votes would earn you more governance power, not more rewards. Governance decisions would be strictly based on stake-weighted vote and all P-Reps (sub P-Reps included) that meet the mandatory requirements (minimum delegation and synched to a proper block height) would be included in governance decisions. This mitigates the impact of single entities launching multiple nodes. If you want a bigger share of rewards, then you can deploy more nodes, but this will not give you more governance power. If the network wants to incentivize more nodes to join, the network can increase i_rep. More nodes = more decentralization and more security.

As you give feedback please also consider the development effort required in your proposed solution. I have tried to propose a solution that is more about adjusting math rather than making significant adjustments to the core code. Looking forward to hearing everybody’s thoughts!

[nblaze]

Great work, Benny! I dont think that I can add anything further to your list, but I do have some questions about the solution proposals if you dont mind

Short term solution:
Im not sure if Im not using the formula incorrectly, but if I replace the irep with the current total expected monthly icx rewards for all preps and put them all in a spreadsheet, Im getting much better results for the sub-preps, but the overall reward amount for all preps increases as well. That would mean that the higher ranked preps would receive even higher rewards with it.

Long-term solution:
My only concern is that we are doing a 180 on the contribution requirements and removing the competitive nature of the system, we will have no motivation for a prep to perform better than the others (aside from EEPs). I am not sure that the voting power would be such a strong motivator to trigger results as ‘being part of a government’ might be a fun experience but at the end of the day we are all here to make some money. If there is no monetary reward, most teams would not be willing to do better than the others (or better than the bare minimum). The voting also would have close to no effect if almost all preps are earning the same.

If this is the way that we will go and we will be relying on EEPs as a sole motivator for the preps to do better, its probably better to just remove the prep rewards altogether (as they would not be used as a motivator anyway) and leave basic node running rewards instead of prep rewards. That would make us like every other DPoS chain though…

[DSNC]

For now, I would like to concentrate on only one subject: “i-rep rewards”.
For now, I can see the big wish/aim/fight to get to the top of 22 P-Rep list only because of the bigger rewards they can receive. Some P-Reps team are very active in icon community forums ready for anything just to get more ICON community votes in their account. This pushed them to provide false promises, false data and so on. The other P-Rep just can buy their votes to the top 22 P-Reps with their investments (personal or other), which I didn’t concern as bad idea as the rules allow that, but my main point is that everyone wants to get to the top 22 in any case just because of the rewards.
This is why I strongly support the idea all P-Reps to get the same i-reps(enough to run the proper server required for Mainnet) and those with more votes to get 20-30% more accordingly to their votes!
The rest of the rewards(the biggest part) should come from contributions from valuable projects/dapps/tools/… which already have been built.
The benefit for ICON will be quite quickly all 100 P-Reps positions will be filled in with new P-Reps proposals, as everyone will now that the running server node will not be an issue!
Then this will increase competition between each team, as the fight then will be not getting votes from regular not very informed people easy to be manipulated with good words and promises, but the goal will be to be creative and deliver those promises in order to receive more rewards.
So, now I can see the bigger issue of how this can be implemented to work well and if most of the P-Reps agree with my idea, then we all can work on how to implement this in reality as a code on-chain or as rules.

This is only my opinion and my advice on how we can remove a lot of not wanted situations we are experience now. A lot more can be changed and amended to work well for better ICON adoption. I hope all other Main P-Reps can give their Governance decision as well.

[BennyOptions_LL]

Hey Mr. Blaze,

Thanks for the feedback. I’ll answer your questions here, but to avoid too much of a back & forth on this thread we should maybe take it to Telegram to finish the conversation if you have additional follow ups.

Short Term Solution Feedback Response:

Not sure where you are going wrong with the math haha but I’ll give an example. Happy to send you a spreadsheet I made that maps out impact depending on the percentage of the votes that you have.

So right now, ICX Station has ~9% of the votes. Below is the calculation of our rewards in both systems (excluding the rewards for being in the top 22 and assuming i_rep = 50,000)

Current System: 9 x (50,000 / 2) = 225,000 ICX per month

Short Term Solution System: SQRT(9) x (50,000 / 2 ) = 75,000 ICX per month

Now let’s look at a team with only 1% of the vote and see the effect:

Current System: 1 x (50,000 / 2) = 25,000 ICX per month

Short Term Solution System: SQRT(1) x (50,000 / 2) = 25,000 per month

As you can see, the effect is far greater for teams with more votes. Overall, it lowers rewards for everybody with more than 1% of the votes, however, it lowers rewards for teams with many votes far more than it does for teams with less votes, thus closing the gap significantly.

Long Term Solution Feedback Response:

Overall you are correct in your assessment. The core responsibilities of a P-Rep would be block validation/maintaining technical infrastructure and governance. The contribution side of things would be through the Contribution Proposal System (EEPs and the DBP).

As I stated previously, I believe this would fix many of the current problems we are dealing with, but I am open to hearing about new potential issues that would arise as well as alternative solutions. Yes, P-Reps would not be in competition for votes - to me, this is a good thing. P-Reps would not need many rewards, just enough to earn a reasonable profit for operating a node - to me, this is a good thing. It mitigates the centralization of power and increases decentralization.

Voting would still be meaningful. For example, if you hate this idea, it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to vote for ICX Station, as we would likely support something like this. If you love the idea, you would want to vote for ICX Station to push initiatives like this. This would still be true in my Longer Term Solution proposal.

Those that would be earning the lion’s share of rewards would be teams that execute EEPs or build DApps. They would come to the network seeking votes that would approve a specific initiative. I believe this is a more efficient solution than what we currently have, where P-Rep teams are first earning rewards then deciding, in a centralized way, how they should be spent. In contrast, the rewards would go directly towards specific initiatives, rather than having P-Reps act as a middle man between rewards and initiatives.

As a brief example, let’s look at the recent initiative launched by a few P-Rep teams, ICON Core. In my proposed system, these guys would likely all be running one or more P-Rep nodes for a modest profit, then come together to submit a Contribution Proposal. The contribution proposal would have the details of ICON Core, the people working on it, the goals/KPIs, and most importantly, the budget. All ICX holders would be able to approve or disapprove of this initiative. If approved, funding through block rewards would start funding the ICON Core EEP. The ICON Core EEP team could do as they see fit with the ICX, but I would also expect some of it to be used to delegate to their P-Rep nodes to increase their respective governance power on the network, thus having more power to approve/disapprove future Contribution Proposals.

To briefly address your comment on removing P-Rep rewards altogether, I think we are on the same page but using different terminology. Idk exactly what you mean about the P-Rep reward vs basic node running rewards, but overall, I would expect the amount of ICX earned by an individual P-Rep node to go down significantly, while more rewards would be used to fund specific initiatives.

To your point about being like other DPoS networks, more votes = more rewards is not what makes ICON unique. Tezos has the same concept. “Bakers need at least 10,000 XTZ (~ $22,000) to qualify as a delegate, and having additional delegated stake increases their chances of being selected as a Baker or Endorser.” Baking/endorsing a block is how you earn rewards in Tezos. More votes = higher chance of baking/endorsing a block. There are other things that make ICON unique (rewards going directly to voters, Contribution Proposal System, etc.)

While this is a major shift in the responsibilities of the P-Rep, the ethos of DPoC is still here. We, as a network, still need to vote on initiatives to further the growth of the network. In this vision, ICON itself is a true DAO - allocating funding to specific initiatives in a decentralized way to further grow itself.

[nblaze]

Thanks for the detailed response! I dont think that there would be any back and forth here - I only have not checked the calculations yet (as its 4AM here once again), but in case that I have any further questions about them, I will drop you a message.

I honestly am not sure whether the long-term solution that you are offering would be a better option or not. I just deducted (same as you - it seems that we are on the same page here) that the current prep rewards are higher as they were set under the assumption that they will be used to move the system forward and that if we go this way, we can set a lower amount of prep rewards (to cover running the nodes and minor projects - enough to get the pro-active preps to the top 22) and rely mostly on the EEPs.

I dont see anything wrong with that - I was surprised by the sudden change of direction, but Im not against it. In order to move the chain forward we should be open minded to all kind of solutions, especially the unorthodox ones

[duyyudus]

Short-term solution makes sense, I agree with you.

However, for long-term, here is my thought as an ICONist, it does not necessarily reflect ICONVIET opinion.

1. With that new rule of even PRep reward allocation, ICON is becoming more like other chains in which validators are paid to secure the network with a reasonable compensation, and the actual contribution/build is done via community grant proposal that is oversaw either on-chain or off-chain. ICON’s Contribution Proposal System is basically an on-chain community grant program. DAO is just a fancy name.
2. The cost of running nodes in ICON network is significantly higher than most of other chains, mostly because of very high requirement in server specs. Low-end hardware requirement is very important to maintain a decentralized network. If the reward is just barely enough for server cost, no one will bother to join ICON as PRep. There is a lot of other similar chains out there already, why ICON ? And I also see one fact, ICON’s tech is not interesting enough for people to join because they love the tech.
3. Majority of reward is moved to Contribution Proposal System, and again community is still the one judging its validity for fund allocation, therefore problems of PRep reward will likely happen again, including ones like empty initiatives with heavy-PR tricks and full of promises. If community get fooled by PRep promises, they will probably get fooled again with new Community Proposal.
4. UDPATE
   I forgot one point. If reward is the same for all PReps, no one will try to get to top 22 because reward is almost the same, no incentive for them at all. Therefore, the purpose of delegation will also become pointless as quality of all PReps is the same ( they don’t need to do better ). With that reason, people will probably vote randomly.
   The issue here is, there are only 22 main validators in ICON. Without meaningful delegation from community, any wealthy actor could easily take over top 22 if they want to grab power ( grabbing power is NOT the same as attacking the chain ). We will end up with a very centralized chain.
   Even-allocation of reward may work well in chains with a lot of main validators ( hundreds ) whose duty is mostly about securing the network. A large number of validators would help to keep the chain decentralized. It is fine when validator quality is the same, as long as they don’t attack the chain. But it is not the case for ICON.

[radiofriendly123]

Hey Scott, thanks for drawing up these suggestions and sharing them.

These are significant changes to a system that was designed over the last several years, so I do have some hesitation to go making wholesale changes quickly.

Question - Would these changes to the IISS be implemented by the foundation without a vote, or would these changes be voted on via a proposal?

My feedback, for what it’s worth, is below. I do agree with a lot of your points - my responses are limited to disagreements or a devil’s advocate perspective for discussions sake. These are my opinions alone and do not reflect the opinions of anyone else on the ICONation P-Rep team.

1.) Competition instead of collaboration. Some P-Reps have collaborated, but there is a competitive nature to this rewards design that limits synergies and incentivizes combativeness, smearing, a major focus on PR/politics, etc.

Isn’t competition typically a good thing? Don’t we want teams competing to earn more rewards based on quality contributions? When I look at the top several P-Rep teams I see a set of teams that are eager and willing to share revenue in the forms of grants. I see teams that have already contributed to the ecosystem with plans to do bigger and better things down the road as well. The community has voted for these teams for the most part because they are largely trusted to do what’s right with the rewards, no? If everyone is making the same, or close to the same, won’t apathy eventually settle in? “I’m getting the same rewards as everyone else, why should I do more” - sort of mentality is a fear I have of everyone getting the same.

2.) Votes are too concentrated - this is a research intensive decision and many people do not put in the time/effort necessary to comfortably diversify their votes among many P-Reps.

I don’t disagree here. I have personally been trying to push the narrative for community members to spread their votes and to not just focus on the top teams. Could there possibly be a solution in some sort of “auto-vote” feature for those who are apathetic to the cause and just simply want to stake? We need data to confirm it, but I suspect those who are apathetic to the cause simply vote for the top teams because they “must be trustworthy”. My hunch is that these users aren’t really all that interested in being educated and sifting through proposals, they just want their staking rewards. So, if they are essentially casting random delegations anyways, perhaps there is a solution that would result in them auto-delegating to teams outside of the top 10…something along these lines?

Example: Open ICONex - Click an “auto-stake” button & rewards are randomly distributed to teams outside of the top X positions.

Perhaps it’d need to be a bit more complex than that, but if they don’t care where their votes are going anyhow, keep it as simple as possible.

I think a better distribution of votes would be more helpful than lowering i_rep as well. So, any ways we can encourage this should be a priority imo.

4.) P-Reps at the top are getting too many rewards.

Too many rewards? This seems arbitrary to me. How do we define what equates to too many rewards? If we have teams up top that are committed to contributing to quality grant proposals and growing the ecosystem, how do we define what is too much and what is too little? If a large initiative is proposed that comes with a significant cost, isn’t it a good thing for P-Rep teams to have capital available to make that initiative come to fruition?

If the ultimate goal is to shift the responsibility of contribution to EEP’s, then yes - P-Reps are earning too many rewards. More on that below though.

5.) Self-delegation by ICX whales is highly economical and there is no unbiased/objective/decentralized way to stop this with the current design.

Indeed. One would think that a whale that has spent a fortune on ICX to self-delegate would be concerned about the network’s future, but that’s not always the case, unfortunately. Fortunately, most of the top delegates seem to be community-voted teams that are committed to making positive contributions, for now.

6.) There is a strong economic incentive to buy votes. Although we have stifled this problem for now via political tactics, I would much prefer a solution at the protocol level.

No disagreement or devil’s advocate from me on this one.

7.) Overlap between responsibilities of a P-Rep and what will be the responsibilities/scope of an EEP.

I was a bit surprised to see the expected role of a P-Rep evolve as it was defined throughout ICONSENSUS. I originally expected P-Reps to essentially just be block producers. As documentation was released throughout the ICONSENSUS period, it became more and more apparent that P-Reps would also be expected to share the role of EEP’s and DApp creators. I was a bit surprised to see that, but it made sense based on the rewards that were being earned by P-Reps. This shifted my thinking to believe that P-Reps were more than block producers and this was intentional and by design. Now, a month or so after decentralization this is not the case? I’m a bit concerned to see such a fast shift in the mentality here, but at the same time I would say that a change would make sense to prevent some of the overlap with responsibilities.

As far as the short term solution proposed goes - It’s creative and I understand the logic behind it, but it’s also difficult for me to support at this time. I genuinely believe the the majority of the teams that have a higher delegation earned the higher delegation throughout ICONSENSUS. For the most part, we see teams that have been supporting ICON for quite some time now that have demonstrated their dedication to the network and its community. I don’t think it makes sense to essentially reduce the rewards earned by these teams in order to level the playing field so everyone is receiving similar rewards. Am I wrong to think of this from a socialist vs. capitalist perspective? If everyone is getting $1 at the end of the day, who is going to work hard? If there’s a chance to earn $100 at the end of the day, everyone is going to work hard. No?

As far as the longer term solution goes - I like it. I think it makes a lot of sense and my only question is - why this wasn’t considered from the jump? Perhaps it was? I have to believe that the foundation considered these things when designing the rewards system. Was the goal to advertise huge rewards for P-Reps in order to get them on board and committed throughout the initial phase, then to gradually (or maybe not so gradually) reduce their rewards in order to make room for EEP’s and DApp creators? The concept of an EEP has been known for a long time now. It just seems a bit strange now that P-Reps are involved and committed and EEP’s are on the horizon that we’re talking about shifting the responsibilities and rewards so quickly.

I’m just thinking out loud there. If the rewards and responsibilities need to be shifted in this direction to benefit the ICON ecosystem then I’d be all for it and would support it completely. It’s just a bit frustrating that, after committing a lot of time and energy, a lot of the P-Rep teams that were planning on making large contributions may suddenly find themselves eliminating team members and singularly focusing on being block producers.

Again, if it’s what’s right for ICON and the community, I’m all for it.

Thanks again for sharing your proposal. I do hope that changes will be made via a vote (on chain) and not just implemented by the foundation.

[bwhli]

Hi Scott! Been thinking about this a lot. Some thoughts below.

1.) Competition instead of collaboration. Some P-Reps have collaborated, but there is a competitive nature to this rewards design that limits synergies and incentivizes combativeness, smearing, a major focus on PR/politics, etc.

The concept of an election naturally creates competition, and this has been the case in every election I am aware of (e.g. candidates compete to attract votes). Since the beginning of the election process, both the foundation and the community have fostered an environment of competitiveness. Every team was focused on differentiation - a behavior that is motivated by the desire to compete. It would’ve been crazy to just come out and say “we’re going to run a node and produce blocks, that’s our contribution”. In the end, the point of the election was to differentiate and compete for votes.

2.) Votes are too concentrated - this is a research intensive decision and many people do not put in the time/effort necessary to comfortably diversify their votes among many P-Reps.

This is the root cause of the issue, and not one that can be fixed at the protocol level (the protocol can’t reassign votes for voters). In the short term, the obvious way to address this is for ICON Foundation to spread their votes across all P-Reps with some sort of curved distribution.

I don’t have insight into the internal discussions regarding ICON’s plans, but I don’t see the need for ICON to have nearly 30M ICX in delegations.

In ICON’s words, “ICONists are strongly encouraged to spread their delegation across multiple P-Reps to prevent the centralization of power.” I’d like to see the foundation lead by example by doing the same thing. If ICON spreads around its 24M ICX across sub P-Reps, it would help balance the vote disparity immediately, and gives those sub P-Reps the chance to re-stake their rewards since they’ll actually be able to run a node with a profit. Over time, re-staking will allow teams to be less reliant on ICON.

Since you work for ICON Foundation, do you have any insight into why the foundation is keen on maintaining 16% of votes?

3.) Some P-Reps have reported being extorted by voters trying to push the teams to do what they want.

Yes, this is a real issue that we have encountered ourselves. At the moment, I don’t have any ideas on how to fix this because we are still unable to pinpoint what vote buying is exactly. If there is to be a protocol level fix, then the ideas behind the code will have to be agreed upon first.

4.) P-Reps at the top are getting too many rewards.

Like Radiofriendly said, this is arbitrary because it leaves many questions open.

• Too many for who?
• Which P-Reps are in “the top”, and does that fluctuate?
• etc…

From my perspective, there are definitely teams in the Top 5 who are receiving too many rewards - ICON Foundation, VELIC, and ICX Station.

• ICON Foundation is making ~$52,000 per month. While they are singlehandedly the biggest contributor to this decentralized network, I think it’s ironic that they hold the most power in this decentralized network. This can be addressed immediately if ICON releases a plan to stake to other P-Reps and commit to staking a large percentage of staking rewards to other P-Reps. This kills two birds with one stone - ICON effectively makes less $$$ per month and the vote equalization will help sub P-Reps immensely.

• VELIC is making ~$40,000 per month. I understand they are a partner of ICON, but they have an existing business that generates income via exchange fees and other financial products. I haven’t seen much from them in terms of information about what they plan on doing with rewards. Perhaps some pressure can be placed on them to give more information. Maybe they would be interested in staking to sub P-Reps as well if many teams talked to them about it.

• ICX Station is making ~$30,000 a month. I assume your team is getting too much rewards because you are coming forth with this issue.

The teams below the Top 3 are a mixed bag. I can totally see the argument that they aren’t making too much. For example, ICONation is is bringing in ~$22,000 per month. With 5 team members who are actively contributing, I don’t think that amount is excessive by any teams - certainly not as much as the top 3 teams. In this scenario, the top 3 teams are all controlled by ICON or heavily affiliated with ICON. Thus, I would implore ICON to consider exercising its power and spread votes to make a more decentralized network.

5.) Self-delegation by ICX whales is highly economical and there is no unbiased/objective/decentralized way to stop this with the current design.

ICX Station tweeted this just two days ago.

From this forum comment, it sounds like you are against self-delegation by whales. However, in the tweet, it looks like ICX Station is actively encouraging self-delegation by whales by advertising the increased ROI versus staking only.

Can you clarify your stance on the issue?

6.) There is a strong economic incentive to buy votes. Although we have stifled this problem for now via political tactics, I would much prefer a solution at the protocol level.

Isn’t disqualification a solution at the protocol level?

I don’t know if it’s possible to skip the “political tactics” because there are so many factors involved in vote buying, the most prominent of which is that we still don’t know what vote buying is. Without definitive consensus on the human/social level via debate and thought, we can’t put anything into code because humans are the ones who are writing the code.

Let me know if I am misunderstanding “protocol level”.

7.) Overlap between responsibilities of a P-Rep and what will be the responsibilities/scope of an EEP.

This is a very dangerous route to go down because it’s a complete 180 from what ICON designed and promoted over the last two years. Over the last week or two, I’ve been hearing some talk about P-Reps only operating as block producers with an equalization of rewards, while additional projects would be shifted to EEPs and DBPs. Quite frankly, this was not what we signed up for.

The whole election was built on the premise of differentiation and competition. This is not my take on it, this is the reality. If P-Reps were expected to be block producers only, then we wouldn’t have certain P-Reps focused on UX design, business development, incubation, marketing, etc. We have all of these P-Reps with different skillsets because that was encouraged.

If P-Reps were to be reduced to block producers only, I don’t see how that would help ICON. On the contrary, it would encourage P-Rep apathy if the expectation is to only produce blocks. That would effectively make ICON like every other PoS chain, which I think is what PoC was trying to change in the first place?

Since you have some insight into ICON’s internal communications, may I ask what is the trigger for proposing a big change like this? What did the foundation envision for P-Reps? Was it “block producer” or “block producer as a minimum”?

Based on the evidence we have so far, it seems like ICON really wanted P-Reps to do more than just produce blocks. This is evident in ICX Station’s P-Rep proposal as well, as your team is focusing on acceleration, incubation, education, and research - four areas that definitely could overlap with EEP.

8.) This is not decentralized enough, thus we lack some key benefits of public blockchain (immutability, security, etc.) since we are essentially 22 non-anonymous entities that could easily be shut down by authorities, collude to alter transactions, freeze accounts, etc. This is especially true considering the concentration of votes.

I agree that we are not decentralized enough. To address the concentration of votes, ICON can impact that immediately by shifting their votes.

Lastly, I want to stress the importance of P-Rep collaboration in this IISS enhancement process. Since ICON is in charge of committing the core code, can you confirm if we will have a governance vote for such changes?

[BennyOptions_LL]

Hey RadioFriendly - I’ll try my best to answer your questions below:

Would these changes to the IISS be implemented by the foundation without a vote, or would these changes be voted on via a proposal?

Answer: I honestly don’t know.

1.) Competition has its place, but we are all working toward the same goal here. So to me, I don’t necessarily see the benefit in this situation. I would ideally like a much more collaborative approach. The problem to me is that the direct economic incentive is to garner votes, not to contribute. Garnering votes entails a strong social media presence. Teams could be contributing with no social media presence at all, but they would not receive any credit. I don’t share the same fear of the free-rider problem that you do. I believe people will contribute for two main reasons - skin in the game and belief in the project. Both of which are mutually exclusive from the concept of more votes = more rewards.

2.) Auto-vote feature could be interesting. If you are interested in pushing that proposal I would flesh it out a bit more and start it on a different thread.

4.) (Just noticed you skipped 3 haha) I think of too many rewards in terms of what could be bought with that money. For example, Ditto PR (one of the best PR firms in the industry) costs ~20k USD per month to hire. I really didn’t expect (and still don’t expect) anybody on a P-Rep team to quit their full time jobs and work solely as an ICON P-Rep. Running a block producer is only really done full-time by teams that run nodes on many different networks (things like Staked, Everstake, Infinity Stones, Certus One, etc.) I say too much money because this is enough to salary full-time professionals/specialists.

5.) I am not against self-delegation, sorry for the confusion. I was just listing out some of the complaints that I had seen in telegram. People were complaining about fully self-delegated teams with no proposal. This is an open decentralized network, and right now it is quite economical to do this. My point here is that this (self-delegation) would not be a complaint in my long term solution.

Short Term Solution - The short term solution is just to take the SQRT of everybody’s votes before doing the calculation. This still has more votes = more rewards it is just less of a disparity. We could implement this solution then raise i_rep to a comfortable level. I can send you the spreadsheet I built if you want to see the actual numbers. Just ping me on TG.

Long Term Solution - I am not sure what the line of thinking was in the beginning as I was not part of this team from the start. Maybe I would have pushed this maybe I wouldn’t have, but where we currently stand is what matters. I am glad you like it.

The expectation initially was that votes would be more balanced, because from a voter’s perspective it doesn’t economically matter who you vote for. We expected people to spread votes to ~10 teams equally based on who they liked. If votes are more balanced, all Main P-Reps would receive ~i_rep and all sub P-Reps would receive ~i_rep / 2.

I hear your frustration and I am open to specific feedback on how to improve IISS. To your concern about P-Rep teams disbanding, I would think you would instead form EEP/DApp teams to fund specific initiatives such as ICONation’s wallet, the price feed oracles, ICON Core, etc.

[BennyOptions_LL]

Hey Brian - I’ll address some of your points below:

1.) I agree that everybody was discussing how they would contribute to the ecosystem. I did not expect it to turn as competitive/political as it did. I expected it to be more balanced because voters are not economically incentivized to vote for any one specific team.

2.) This can be solved at the protocol layer by adjusting incentives. We can remove the negative impact of a high concentration of votes as discussed in my long term solution. As for the ICON Foundation using treasury funds to elect certain nodes/balance out votes, this needs to be done quite carefully. People could see it as hand-picking nodes that they like. This is the early stages of decentralization and the ICON Foundation still wants to be involved, that is why they are at the top.

3.) A protocol level fix would be to remove the significant incentive to garner votes. If gathering as many votes as possible is not economically incentivized, then voters could not push around P-Reps.

4.) I answered this above in the reply to Radiofriendly.

5.) We have no problem with self-delegation. I shared more details on the reply to RadioFriendly.

6.) P-Rep DQ proposal is not a protocol level solution. By protocol level, I am talking about adjusting behavior through the use of economic incentives and technology. The P-Rep DQ proposal is not meant to be used for enforcement of off-chain policies. I do not want ICON to be viewed as a centralized chain that has a cartel of nodes that DQ nodes that don’t abide by off-chain policies, it’s not very decentralized. Removing the economic incentive to buy votes is what I am looking into.

7.) How would you suggest fixing the overlap between Contribution Proposals and P-Reps? What would ICON Core fall under? If P-Reps become more about block producers, the greater portion of the rewards would go toward specific initiatives, which would mitigate the risk of wasted capital. RHIZOME would turn into a team that regularly proposes specific EEPs or DApps that you would like funding for. ICON Core and MetrICX would be examples of EEPs/DApps that you would submit proposals for. I outlined all of this in the initial post.

I proposed this change because it offers a protocol level solution to the problems that were outlined above. Happy to hear if you have other solutions, or maybe you like things the way they are, which is your prerogative.

[bwhli]

Thanks for the quick reply, Scott! I appreciate it.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking on this topic, and I want to get one thing straight. At the moment, it sounds like ICX Station and ICON Foundation (correct me if I’m wrong) are heavily pushing for reducing and equalizing P-Rep rewards, and to offload non-node work to EEPs and DBPs. Is this initiative motivated by the unequal vote distribution?

If the answer is yes, I would be in support of some of these changes.

If the answer is no, then there needs to be a lot more discussion about why this is happening now. I ask because since the beginning of the election, P-Rep candidates were never led to believe they would only be node operators with no further commitments to the ecosystem. In fact, ICON itself hosted quite a number of panel discussions for P-Reps to talk about why their team is DIFFERENT. If the expectation all along was for all P-Reps to be node operators, there would be no need for discussions about what a P-Rep can bring to the table outside maintaining a stable node.

To elaborate on that point, many teams like Pocket, Chainode, Gilga, and others have created various dashboards with the sole purpose of showing ICONists the differences between teams (e.g. Team A is focused on marketing, Team B is focused on development, etc.). These dashboards were created quite early on in the election process, so if contribution outside node operation was not supposed to be an important factor for a P-Rep team to have, I think the foundation should’ve spoken up about it. For example, RHIZOME has been operating a very stable node - that’s mostly on me as I am the lead sysadmin on the team. Our other members are developing apps and creating content. If we had known there would be talk about P-Reps shifting into a node operation role with reduced rewards, we would’ve never formed the team that we did in the first place. This is most certainly the case with other teams as well, ICX Station included.

So, the important question here is did ICON misjudge how the election would go, and is trying to implement this new system as a reaction? If that’s the case, I am completely in support of improving the incentive structure. What I do not like is the lack of acknowledgement that things went wrong, and that perhaps the design didn’t work as expected. Again, it’s okay if that is the case. This is a completely new technology, and there are bound to be mistakes - that’s why we are all here to discuss and improve. At the moment, my team along with a few others I’ve spoken to are a bit puzzled over this sudden 180, and realistically that’s exactly what it is. Reducing P-Reps to node operators and moving other contributions to EEPs and DBPs is completely different from the model that was marketed to candidates before the election.

With that out of the way, here are responses to the questions.

1. Indeed, everybody was discussing how to contribute in unique ways because that’s how the concept of P-Rep was marketed in the beginning. It didn’t take long for the community to demand teams that did more than just operate a node. Regarding the election outcome, I suppose it’s a moot point now that the general ranking has been established. Since this is a community-involved project, it does make sense that the teams at the top are comprised of long-standing community members. There was no economic incentivize to vote for specific teams, but there was a layer of trust which is difficult to break. People like and vote for teams that they trust, and many teams that participated did not have a presence in ICON channels prior to the election. I think that’s what ultimately pushed teams like ICX Station, ICONation, UBIK, and RHIZOME to the top.

2. I agree that ICON voting for nodes can be seen as handpicking, and if something like that were to happen, it would need to be done carefully and advertised very well. What are your thoughts on ICON Foundation using a curve to distribute votes to the low-mid tier teams with very little delegation to top tier teams? The curve could be made public, and the delegation could be changed once a week to account for new teams signing up. In this case, I don’t see why ICON would not be involved or give up power. In the end, the 24M ICX they delegated is still theirs. In the model I am proposing, they are simply delegating ICX to other teams, not sending ICX to other teams. If ICON needed delegation percentage to influence a major vote, they can shift votes to themselves anytime. I guess my main question is if there is any reason that ICON needs 29M ICX delegated to them? I don’t buy the influence argument, as they can change votes back to themselves at anytime.

3. In other words, you are proposing a system where more votes does not equal more rewards, right? There are definitely some pros and cons to that. On the pro side, this could definitely reduce the impact of vote buying and/or a big voter urging a team to lower I-Rep “or else”. In a system where “other contributions” were pushed to EEPs and DBPs, I can see this system working. Like I said earlier, though, isn’t this a complete 180 from the original system that ICON designed - where P-Reps should work hard and differentiate themselves to win the hearts and minds of voters? It’s scary to me that a system that was in the works for years is subject to a complete rework weeks after launch.

4. Thanks for your reply, I misunderstood the original point.

5. Understood, thank you for the clarification. On a slightly unrelated note - regarding ICON being viewed as a centralized chain, I also don’t want that to happen. That’s why I suggested ICON Foundation use some of their voting power to empower other P-Reps. At the moment, there are definitely some P-Reps operating a loss. This may be okay for some, but not for others. We have to be aware of different financial standards in different parts of the world, and cannot assume that everyone is willing to operate at a loss in a speculative market that may have a huge upside in the future. Imagine someone browsing the ICON tracker for the first time, and seeing the #1 node operator is the foundation itself. It wouldn’t be a far stretch to say that person may have second thoughts regarding ICON’s decentralization. A way to address that would be for ICON to shift votes across all teams. That would result in three benefits.

• From an optics perspective, ICON appears more decentralized at first glance. If someone looks into it more, they may find that ICON still has majority of voting power, but at least they are actively trying to use their enormous funding to decentralize the network. Baby steps.
• Both main P-Reps and sub P-Reps receive more funding to participate in optional activities like participating in testnet to build a stronger and more secure infrastructure for the whole network. Servers are expensive, and I understand sub P-Reps maybe 27 and under can run a $50/month node in citizen mode. That’s not the point though. What if they want to spin up a high end server to participate in a stress test or if they want to practice setting up a load-balanced citizen node cluster? The costs add up quickly even if you use spot instances on AWS or GCP.
• ICON still retains power because the 24M ICX never leaves their wallet. It can be pointed back at ICON Foundation at anytime.

7. This answer to this question is highly dependent on what the underlying incentive model is. In the current structure where more votes = more rewards for P-Reps, ICON CORE would undoubtedly fall under our P-Rep duties. The reason for this is that every P-Rep team has been encouraged to differentiate themselves with other contributions since the beginning of the election.

If we were to shift to a system where P-Reps would solely be node operators, then something like ICON CORE would obviously apply for funding via an EEP because we wouldn’t have the funding via P-Rep rewards to execute on something like this.

Again, I don’t hate this proposed system at all. I just want clarity on why the original system is under discussion for a complete rework just a few weeks into decentralization.

---

To summarize, I like your proposal Scott. I am just concerned as an ICONist who’s been around since the beginning. Ever since talks about the P-Rep election first started, the narrative was always “ICON will be different because the block producers will do more than just produce blocks”. I am not the only one who thought this way! It’s evident that every single team thought this way if you look at the way they approached their election campaigns. For example, there are teams that are 100% dedicated to UX design, video production, etc. In the “new” system, these teams would likely be better off just applying for EEPs without the added overhead of operating a node as a P-Rep.

Short term, it’s obvious we can’t switch to this system because EEPs and DBPs don’t exist yet. Thus, I would suggest ICON Foundation to consider spreading some of its 24M votes around to increase interest for P-Reps. The core of the issue here is vote distribution, NOT high rewards for top P-Reps. The high rewards is a byproduct of the poor vote distribution, so logically speaking, we should be working to increase vote distribution and this will naturally have a negative impact on rewards for top teams. I am not convinced lowering I-Rep to 40K is a suitable method for dealing with this issue because I-Rep is a global metric that affects everyone. Lowering I-Rep actually hurts lower teams even more, which is the exact issue we’re trying to fix. Politically speaking, a few teams have also been using “lowering I-Rep to 40K” as a marketing platform to attract votes. I think this is wrong because where does it stop? If all Top 22 were pressured from voters to lower I-Rep, why would it stop at 40K. We are in a bear market right now and sentiment is arguably at an all time low. Everyone seems to hate the word “inflation”, and they understand that I-Rep has an impact on the amount of ICX issued for rewards. My fear is what would happen if the same discussion happens at 40K? Over time, would we be pressured to lower to 30K, 20K, 10K? Initially, I understood I-Rep as a dynamic metric that could be adjusted to essentially aid in pegging rewards to a USD target. Thus, an increase in ICX price would warrant a decrease in I-Rep. With that in mind, I don’t understand why I-Rep would also be decreased when the price of ICX is declining.

Long term, if we are unable to solve the vote distribution issue, I think shifting to a system where P-Reps operate nodes and participate in governance, while submitting EEP and DBP proposals for other contributions is a viable idea - but this should only be done after we have more clarify about how EEPs and DBPs will work.

Lastly, Bong was able to confirm that such a change would require a vote. Glad to hear that’s the case!

[Devil]

Wow wall of text that most Iconists are not going to read.

Inflation

IISS was always going to be inflationary and self delegating gets you 70% more than staking.

Autostaking

Suggested before ICON attempted to decentralize.

Decentralized

Obviously not with a handful of associated P-REPs including the Foundation holding most of the votes.

Value

Yes some P-REPs get far too much ICX, helped by self delegating and Foundation support.

Number

22 block producers is not enough

Foundation

Time to sort the crap out.

Summary

Almost all Iconists are only interested in the price of ICX and the future looks very bad with IISS as it was designed by the Foundation.

[NorskKiwi]

I’m actually quite happy with where things are at at the moment. I find talk of wholesale changes to P-Rep structure and IISS a bit reactionary and unwarranted. On that topic though, where are C-Reps? There are pieces of the puzzle still missing that I’d like to see ICON add before considering changes to the bits that are already implemented.

Our inflation rate is about 7.5%. This is more than completely offset when an ICONist stakes their ICX. It’s passive ICX holders that lose value here. I think we should increase I_rep as well as increasing main P-Rep numbers from 22 to 30 to spur network growth.

In our first year since decentralisation we have to come out swinging. We need to invest in marketing, we need to invest in development, but most of all we need to invest in decentralisation. The way we attract more competive talented P-Reps is by ensuring P-Rep rewards are high enough. Austerity as a fiscal policy is a known failure. I want to see many P-Reps pushing ICON’s decentralised ID tech and their DApps all over the globe.

Why are people saying we have too many votes or funds?? We have community voted P-Reps and self funded business P-Reps. The community votes are heavily weighted on Ubik, ICONation, and Rhizome, as they should be. The community knows and trusts these teams. Why would they spread rewards to people who have shown no prior history of supporting our ecosystem. As an ICONist I want to make sure I’m backing teams that I know are focused on ICX. For anyone wondering, ICONation hasn’t used a single ICX yet either. A lot of teams haven’t. All this inflation and dumping scare is just scaremongering imo.

No one would leave their job for this? Wrong mate… I did. Before addressing that though I should note that P-Reps could have been working and getting paid doing something else, but we were instead running our campaigns and working for the ecosystem. I myself put aside my brewing business to focus on ICON. I would have launched 2-3 of my products in the last 6 months and been available in stores nationwide. I have people contacting me regularly about it, in fact today I was again invited to a Christmas fair which would have potentially returned me thousands of USD in revenue. I put all of this aside because of my wish to work for the ICON community. Real talk though man, that hurts more hearing it from a salaried employee.

No matter which way we go I’m extremely excited for the future and am going to be driving us forward!

[thelionshire]

I appreciate the discussion. I think some good points have been brought up on both sides. Things can always be improved but I’m happy with the launch thus far and I think ICON designed a very good system and I think we should not rush to make major changes. Over the past several months, P-Reps have brought lots of excitement, marketing, community involvement, DApps, tools, and more to ICON. Most importantly, we helped in testnet and launch the decentralized network. Much of this without getting paid, as pay is within the last month.

I would like to stress that large scale changes such as this should be thought through very carefully. I think we really need to hear from ICON about what their thoughts are of the system. They spent over a year designing the system and I think overall it’s a great system that rewards contribution. We need to hear what they think of it thus far and how they think it will be in the future. If they think it’s good, then perhaps we leave it as is and let it grow. If they think it’s not good, then why? And what is different in the first month than what they were expecting that is causing it to not be good? Making large changes to the whole system in this way comes across as throwing in the towel on proof of contribution and saying it didn’t work, because essentially we would have a proof of stake network if p reps are only block producers. I think the system is working well already and is only going to improve with time as more p reps join. I think we need to give it a chance to show the success of the new system of proof of contribution. Perhaps time will show it’s a great system or perhaps it will show it’s not a great system. Maybe it’s better to have a POS system that rewards investors who just want to run a node. P reps can still do this- they just likely won’t get much voter support. Maybe POC is better in that it inspires p reps to do more than run a node? Time will tell.

As others have stated, if vote concentration is the only potential issue, then there are some potential solutions. I do agree vote concentration is an issue and we should try to help. One such solution is ICON spreading votes as their 24M self stake is a major cause for the top spot being skewed. This could also help lower teams catch up a bit and if done in a public manner based on a modeled curve, I believe it would be fair. In addition, I think the modification to rewards warrants discussion. But I think modifying to reduce by the square root is too much. While the top 2 teams have significant self votes, voters clearly show strong support for many teams at the top. This is based on the time, effort, and trust many of these teams have built. Fair elections and varying rewards are capitalist, and I think that is good for bringing out the best. I would support a smaller factor to even things out though. Perhaps a factor of raising rewards to the 0.75, rather than 0.5 (square root).

I agree that EEP and DBP will require changes to the system to properly work. But I don’t think bringing P-Reps down to only being block producers is the right answer. Perhaps if this was the plan all along, but it wasn’t how this was portrayed or marketed. So why have a year of campaign and base everything on proof of contribution, only to step back and change things a month after decentralization? If this was the plan, then it should have been stated as such. And maybe this is a better plan, to have p reps as only block producers, and leave contribution to EEP and DBP, but that’s not how the system was portrayed for the last year, and I don’t think a rapid change would be healthy. There certainly will need to be some changes to ensure p reps, EEPs, and DBP operate in harmony, but they should be slow and calculated. I think the most difficult thing in all of this is knowing what we as p reps should plan for? We made a proposal based on the system, but the fact that all of these massive changes are being considered makes it prudent to be very cautious to start efforts that may be changed due to a massive overhaul of the system very soon. Stability encourages growth and I think sticking with a good system is better than changing often to perfect to a great system.

[BennyOptions_LL]

Thanks everybody for the feedback! People are making good points and I appreciate the collaborative effort to make IISS the best it can be. A few things I want to note just to reel in this conversation a bit.

1. The Long Term Solution - As stated in the title, this is a long term solution to enhance IISS. I have always viewed the current version of IISS as a first stage of decentralization, where we would work together to further decentralize the network. This is something that would not be feasible to implement anytime soon, so for all of you concerned that I am trying to make massive changes just a month into decentralization, rest assured this will not happen. Given that it’s been about a month, I think it is fair to start aggregating some of the current issues/feedback and exploring potential solutions.

2. I want to clarify that my first post is meant to be a starting point. To make this thread more productive, let’s try to focus responses on this thread to asking questions about the initial post, proposing tweaks to the initial post, proposing new concerns about IISS, and/or proposing an alternative solution to the issues outlined in the original post. For example, if you have an issue with something in the original post, try your best to both raise the issue and propose a solution. Of course, if you believe the current system is as you would want it, then feel free to express that opinion as well (as some already have).

3. Overall, the goal I am shooting for is to solve the issues outlined in the original post via protocol level adjustments to limit the necessity of off-chain intervention, create a truly decentralized network that could one day be used by enterprises to leverage the benefits of public blockchain, and create an on-chain and decentralized system to reward direct contributions to this open source project while protecting against gaming the system. I would say this has always been the goal, and that the current system has a few holes worth exploring solutions for.

[icxer]

How can this be a good thing we need decentralization. In current stacking incentive 5 p-reps own 51% of the power. This is the opposite of decentralization and still and always will be the single most dangerous situation in any crypto project. With this proposal we enhance decentralization and lower power of P-reps and self voted in p-reps. Today number 1 generates more than 20x the cost for running a node at max price, and we know how they got there. Not by big contributions, but by big bags.

At all time high prices current payout model would surpass current trading volume. This is not a question of should we fix it. but how fast can we do it

[nblaze]

As an opinion towards the original proposal by @BennyOptions_LL Im kinda split… I think that such system might be useful, but for an entirely different reason:

The idealist in me loves the idea behind all the preps contributing and 100 teams (or more) working towards the chain progress.

In practice though the situation is quite different though: one month into decentralization and we have most prep teams struggling to even cover their server expenses while at the same time, we are yet to see any of the top prep teams that are way overfunded at this point (according to what they have expected prior to decentralization and according to the resources that they receive compared to what they are releasing) to release even a plan or a statement on what they are currently using those resouses on and how do they justify receiving so much aside from ‘we have invested money so far and we need salaries’. Nobody clarified prior to decentralization that what was stated as ‘we are investing time and resourses out of our own pocket to show our commitment and becuase we believe in the system’, would have to be repaid or that a ‘6 month payment buffer’ might be needed before real work can be done even at a top level. I dont also agree that a simple plan of action could take a month - if this was a real job, that you are payed to do, you would be fired on the spot for something like that.

Honestly for most teams I am seeing less work done and less motivation compared prior to decentralization and this should not be the case. If the teams do not get themselves together and start proving that they all (and by all, I really mean it - including Icon Foundation, Velic, ICX Station, Symmetry etc etc) deserve that kind of funding and that they can use it to grow the network and do it asap (as each day that passes is a potential lost funding of preps that just decided to run nodes on that day), we can easily lower the rewards and switch to DPoS prep system.

I have an even better solution - if there are no results, we wait several months until Pocket/Figment’s citizen nodes project is done and we scrap the majority of preps althogether as we dont need sub-preps if they will not be contributing and if everyone can run a citizen node

[Edouard_Stakin]

Thanks for initiating this debate @BennyOptions_LL

I agree with the issues outlined and think the long-term solution is attractive on many points.

Most notably, it would create incentives for both Main P-Reps and Sub P-Reps to run a node, and re-equilibrate the balance between the top 5 and the rest of the participants. It will also lower incentives to vote buying, although I believe this is a fake problem at the moment, since everybody is aware of the risks of doing such, and P-Reps can submit a disqualification proposal in case it happens.

However, I believe that without an additional complementary mechanism, it would lower the motivation of each and every P-Rep to contribute to the network by doing something else than running a node. Under this model, there is less competition for voters, which means that some P-Reps could do very well just by running a node.

Regarding the long-term solution, I think the current IISS model is well-designed, and maybe that we could improve (i) the education of the community to decentralize (ii) the incentives towards decentralization.

While education can be done via blog articles and media communication, incentives could be set up so that Iconists decentralize their stake towards P-Reps with less votes. What kind of on-chain incentives could we implement?

• Slightly higher rewards when voting for somebody with less vote %
• Proportional slashing, meaning that voting for one of the Top P-Rep would carry an additional risk in case of downtime

In addition, in the short-term, an interesting solution would be to have the ICON Foundation spread their votes towards smaller P-Reps in order to support their activities.

[thelionshire]

Simplest near term solution that will help is for icon to lower their self staked votes. They can lower this amount by 10M and still be in first place (I think icon is deserving and should be in first as the main contributor and creator of the network over the past two years). This will lower the gap and also increase % of lower teams by lowering total votes. Regarding the 24M of self staked icx, icon previously said “this amount will be carefully controlled because this amount should not affect the decentralization of the network.” I think it is time to control this amount and help the decentralization of the network. While this won’t solve all problems, it is a simple and quick fix that will certainly help. It also goes in line with the guidance icon previously gave and I would like to see them act on this. Then icon can adjust votes to ensure they remain at #1 as needed on a weekly or monthly basis. As I said, icon being #1 makes sense, but no need to be 5% ahead of #2 and double #3.

[CoreyCICONVIET]

Unfortunately, I disagree with the paradigm that the foundation is putting forth; it sounds very similar to a redistribution of wealth paradigm which is exactly the contrary of what this ecosystem was meant to be. It would be a shame if we went that route. We need to find another solution or create another solution at the protocol level, but not this one.

I hope this is reconsidered, at least if the protocol level is the way to solve it, we need the paradigm to be enticing for new P-Reps, we’re still 32 short of 100 P-Reps. P-Reps are allocated votes specifically by the ICONist. P-Reps should be transparent with their financial spending and that should be a protocol mandate to increase transparency so ICONists know where the money is going and can delegate their votes with a more cohesive and clarified vision of where the monetary consumption of P-Reps is going. I agree with the idea that P-Reps may take advantage and that’s where other noble P-Reps come in and set them straight, or at least try. We can agree that the redistribution of wealth and the destruction of monetary incentive is not only unproductive, but it will leave no room for economic incentive for new P-Reps, I know I said I’d support any decision, but this is a no no. I would prefer going Radiofriendly’s way and creating a “disciplinary rubric” so to say. This is more dangerous than ICON realizes, and besides, the P-Reps now are in charge of governance and developing the ICON Ecosystem and that cant be done with a lack of funding and I don’t think it’s fair that the foundation, who is the number one P-Rep with massive amounts of economic resources, is now trying to minimize the economic validity of P-Reps.
Truly, if ICONists disagree with how money is being spent by P-Reps, they should reallocate their votes, that sets enough of a precedent.

This is a digital decentralized democratic republic. We have to stop vote buying, that is a fact, but this protocol is not the way to go. It kills economic incentive, I would recommend we create a document of some type that mandates P-Rep economic transparency or something of that nature. That’ll also minimize controversy with the foundation among ICONist, a huge question the community asks is “where did the ICO Funds go?” That lack of transparency can be minimized if we create transparency reports that all P-Reps adhere to, including the foundation.

The only thing I can say to the foundation is this simple question: what if a governmental entity came in and decreed that you had to have a cap on your financial resources that was given willingly by the community? Not only would that cause a detrimental economic ripple effect in your company it would bring in the question of economic survival as a private entity.