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.