This is the medium article that ICON foundation has posted regarding the lowering of I-rep and changing it into P-rep Commission Rate to be a network proposal
One of the biggest concerns with all the network changes that have been happening recently (IISS 3.0 B1 reward removal, I_rep reduced to 14,000) is that the P-reps will not be able to make meaningful contributions to the network with lower rewards and we are always pointed toward the grant options.
This article references two different networks that also have a similar system of collecting votes and validating blocks via validators, and it compares the commission fees which are much higher on the ICON network at the moment. But there is one big difference and that is that validators on those networks aren’t “required” to do any growth for the network. And that makes total sense, even ICON was designed in a similar way with EEPs and DBPs being responsible for the development/marketing funding, but at the point of decentralization everything fell on the laps of P-reps, which should run a node, govern and grow the network.
This was a bad idea, in my opinion, we had to give a lot of rewards to the P-reps without any guarantee that any growth will be made and in the past few months there was a lot of unnecessary hateful discussion regarding the contribution of individual P-reps because of that. We shouldn’t implement things that work in a perfect world, but rather do it in a way that they function in the world today. If the world changes we can change the governance system or development processes at that point.
We are always looking at things on other blockchains if they work and try to implement an improved version of it to the ICON network, but we can also look at some examples from real life. Democratic government is kind of close to how a decentralized governance system should work, and people (ICONists) vote politicians (P-reps) which represent them and make government decisions (Governance proposals). And when the people who govern the countries see that let’s say a road is needed to connect two parts of the country, they don’t go and construct it themselves but they employ construction workers (developers) which are paid from the treasury (CPF) if the work is completed.
I would like to see that P-reps are validators and governance subjects so their contribution to the network is securing and governing it and stray them away from development/marketing, this way they would really be Public Representatives. CPF and maybe more similar approaches should be implemented to stimulate growth on the network.
When ICONists are voting they would need to look at P-reps decisions only on governance level, basically which CPF projects they support and which on-chain governance decisions they approved (no more oh this P-rep did 10 projects 8 of which were twitter posts).
To reduce vote stagnancy re-election would also make sense, if a P-rep has done well in a term there is no problem with someone voting for the same P-rep if they feel that their P-rep has done a great job, but the problem is when a voter votes for someone and leaves those votes there. What happens if the voter couldn’t change his votes due to real-life situations (losing private keys, death). Those votes could be locked to malicious P-rep forever. Besides that I think that active ICONists who can revote once per term are more valuable and bring more contribution than the “lazy voters” who vote and leave the votes to produce rewards, so they should be rewarded more. If you are not active enough in the community to be able to see all the news about re-election that is probably going to be promoted by all P-reps, a lot of ICONists and maybe some other crypto news sites in various social channels than you shouldn’t get the rewards as you are not contributing but instead you are just enjoying rewards from the network for voting once. It is not healthy for the ecosystem if voters get to vote once and can get rewards as long as the network exists, the least we can expect is that they re-vote at a certain interval (not too frequent, but also not too infrequent).
Imagine if we had no elections in countries and people could freely change their votes whenever they feel like it. There would be a group of active voters (people who are interested in politics) and they actively change their votes which is not a bad thing, but some people would vote for one party and leave their votes there for what 10, 20 maybe 30+ years without ever thinking about it and what that political party does. Elections are there for a reason.
I know that the network is kind of moving towards this and in general I agree on reducing rewards from P-reps but I wish to see them be responsible only for securing and governing the network.
Let me know what your thoughts are on the P-rep Commission rates and what the responsibilities of P-reps should be. Do you dis/agree with me? Are there parts of the system that I haven’t considered? How does this affect you as a P-rep? etc.