Thank you for the insult rather than a counterargument, and you’re welcome for the sarcasm. Free of charge.
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Counter argument to what? You haven’t done the necessary research to form a conversant opinion. Probably best viewed as a challenge to become more informed, rather than insult.
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Welcome to the forums.
You’re right, Reuben would like the community to have an attachment to the project. I think there are plenty of members of the community that would also have such hopes. There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, most of the communities in crypto have attachments to their projects. I’d argue that it is often necessary for a community to have such intentions - a common goal, a mutual interest, and a camaraderie amongst each other - in order to function. So I don’t think that is naive, and I would say that people with this in mind are on the right track.
As for the mining, contrary to your argument - this is expected from the miners. We expect miners to seek profit. We expect miners to sell. Reuben has expressed this over and over again. We expect miners to move from coin to coin for whichever suits them best. We expect miners to sell in order to make a profit or to cover overhead. This has been repeatedly stated and expressed. So no, Reuben is not angry about that. He is disappointed that miners consolidate the hash on one pool which can jeopardize the project, yes, and this is not too big of an ask. Even Monero was at risk of such a thing and their community stepped up and their miners moved pools in order to protect the project. This clearly shows it is well within reason to ask our miners to distribute their hash in order to protect the project.
Certainly, people are involved in crypto due to money. The whole intention of crypto is to be money. This is to be expected. Clearly, miners and MN holders are seeking money - whether it be to make a profit, or to use said crypto as the money it was intended for. This isn’t even the argument at hand. The point of the tokenomics was to introduce the community fund. Our current block reward is used up. In order to create the community fund, we need to take rewards from one area to add to the community fund. MNs are our primary security. Mining is backup, but their only real job currently is running the blockchain. MNs are used for numerous jobs. Based on this, logically, we are overpaying for the security from miners. The amounts that are available to vote from were all conjured up by the community. The argument is not that making money is bad.
I am unsure how you got “more block rewards should go to the dev team” considering that we have stated repeatedly in the original thread, in this thread, in our Firo Twitter Spaces, etc that our intentions are not to increase the dev fund. In fact, we have said no to the suggestion to increase the dev fund repeatedly. The dev fund was determined by the community in the first place. If you’re going to come to your conclusions contradictory to evidence or what is being said I don’t think I can make an argument.
Well, the name “dev team” sorta describes itself. Development. You can see work that has been done, and what is being pursued on our roadmap: Roadmap | Firo - Privacy-preserving cryptocurrency and if you can navigate it and all you can check out the GitHub: GitHub - firoorg/firo: The privacy-focused cryptocurrency
The dev fund was determined by the community in order to fund the core team. At the next halving, it can be determined again whether or not the community wants to maintain it. It is agreed that centralization is an issue - the core team could be targeted in order to get at the project. This is actually the exact reason why the community fund was proposed in the first place. The intention is to assist the community by providing funding for the community to fund various items and slowly phase out the dev fund.
I have to admit, I find it particularly amusing that you claim you don’t know or understand what the dev fund is for, what the core team does, or what the intentions of the community fund are for, but are pro-eliminating both. “I don’t know what the cable does, but I’m gonna cut it. Yolo.”
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If there’s a “team” that’s basically putting itself in charge of a coin, its community, whatever, that runs contrary to the core principles of crypto. Imagine if Satoshi were still around, trying to micro-manage everything about bitcoin the way Reuben here seems to be doing with Firo–and that’s exactly the impression I’m getting.
[quote=“DinkBlitz, post:188, topic:2150”]
So no, Reuben is not angry about that.
[/quote]From watching the Youtube interview, that’s how he came off to me. I’m too lazy to go back and find quotes from it, and perhaps I got the wrong impression based on that and a couple other ones I’ve seen with him talking about Firo.
I do appreciate your comments and the explanations you provided. I’ll check out those links and read up on where Firo is headed and how it’s going to get there.
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only 130 voters voted, 
where are the 4k master node owners, or maybe something something
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That’s pretty much all of crypto. Regardless, as already stated, the team is trying to switch it entirely to community control. No dev fund. No core team. etc. Only Community Fund to fund what the community deems worth investing into. We’re already working on a voting system - Aura - to provide voting. The intention of the team is to literally not need the team. For the community to be in charge. Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen by itself - coins don’t build themselves and so a team was needed, and that team needed funding both of which the community decided upon. Now the team is building to eliminate the need for one and the community can take over. How many coins are doing that? Considering what your position appears to be, I have good news for you. Reuben is stepping back. So I suppose that solves whatever issue you have with him.
Reuben stepping back: Should I take a step back?
In case you’re interested in expenditures: Firo Core Team Finances and Expenses Report February 2022
If everything goes well, soon enough the community will be able to take full charge and they can determine what goes, who stays, what’s funded, etc. Who made up the team could be either hired through community governance (like contractors perhaps) or could be available for advisory. Who knows. It will be community governed, though.
I do not think this type of voting would reflect the real opinion of the people who have skin in the game. Maybe the qt wallet should be updated to provide a voting option - 1 firo 1 vote, and could be used in the future as well. That is the only thru way we will see where the community stands at .
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Hello everyone First of all let me introduce myself: My name is Sam (on Telegram) I don’t intervene much but I read almost all the posts.
I have been a Miner since 2017, and it is through this that I discovered Firo, by researching on whattomine what could be the token that will absorb the hashrate of ethereum when it goes into POS.
Currently I mine ETH, because it is the most profitable for my configuration (40 RTx 3080 NON LHR), unlike other miners, I do not sell my crypto for FIAT because my company absorbs the charges.
To date I have sold a lot of eth to buy FIRO and I have a 50/50 ETH/FIRO BAG.
All that to say that it was mining that made me discover FIRO, of course I learned about the project and I think that FIRO is very underestimated and that confidentiality / anonymity will be very important in a short time… Also when looking at the universe of privacy coins, FIRO is one of the most promising with Lelantus spark and Elysium.
So do not neglect the indirect marketing impact that mining brings for FIRO, especially with the transition from ETH to POS soon (I think end of the year).
Today I have about ten MN Firo on a Cloud, because I’m not a big IT technician and I couldn’t find any tutorials on youtube showing me how to make a masternode step by step, so it was easy to do it do on a cloud host.
This is why it is not wise to neglect minors (even if I hear it a lot mine and resell directly).
So that’s why even though I’ve been following the project for a very long time, I’ve all just registered on the forum and if I could vote I would have chosen the following breakdown:
Minor 30/MN 45/ FC10/FD15 or
Minor 30/MN50/5FC/FD 15.
But I find the last proposition of Reuben Very interesting, to divide the block time in 2, all while keeping the same reward, so if I understood it correctly, I will multiply the reward by 2.
With this system (if I understood correctly):
1/ Minors will always be happy with their reward because even by reducing to 30 or 25%, it will remain as it is today.
2/ The MNs will have an APR of more than x2 compared to now, which will encourage the creation of many more MNs and inevitably strong buying pressure (even if the more MNs are created, the more the APR will drop). Do not forget that there are people who are in crypto just for CHALLENGE, stacking and MNs, and no one puts their money in projects where there is a history of fear of falling into a SCAM and firo (Zcoin) exists since 2016…
3 / The community fund will have much more funds, which can be used for liquidity, be listed on exchanges like Kucoin or full of projects for firo including advertising.
I heard a lot that advertising is useless and it was money to waste, so no, if you advertise a shitcoin, YES it will be useless, while advertising for FIRO, which is a project with real fundamentals, will necessarily have an impact.
Advertising is used to discover a project, so yes if the project is crap, the noobies will buy but it will quickly fade, whereas if it’s a real project the impact of good advertising will have a snowball effect, and word of mouth will continue the work.
4 / The development fund will have more money so can be more serene for the future and will have more resources for it’s team.
How to increase the price of firo (this is only my vision):
1/ By drastically increasing the APR of Masternodes
2/ Clean google pages talking about FIRO attack with 51%
3/keep firo at the top of the most profitable currencies on whatomine
4 / Demonstrate through recognized specialists in the cryptosphere that FIRO technology (lelantus spark) is far beyond the others or equivalent to some.
Even if it means paying recognized hackers to try to crack FIRO/MONERO/ZCASH/PIVX/ARRR/BEAM/DASH transactions etc…
5/ Once Elysium and Lelantus Spark launch a major advertising campaign (wait until the house (FIRO) is finished building to advertise it) through influencers, articles showing that firo has better technology than x,y, z privacy token.
6/Encourage to make youtube tutorials (by members of the community) in different languages, what is firo, how to make masternodes, how to use the anonymity function, how to use firo DEX, reassure that it exists non-centralized exchanges (because many people are afraid of confidential currencies because they fear that they will blacklist centralized exchanges)
7/Maybe try to raise funds, like any digital STart UP.
8/Try to find a BIG partner to create bridges with firo for Elysium.
And in the meantime I’m not selling any of my MN Rewards, on the contrary I’m accumulating, because I think FIRO will go very far and the most patient will be rewarded!
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While I may not agree with your choice of rewards breakdown, I agree with everything else and I find myself in the same boat as you.
1 Firo 1 vote also means whales and exchanges get to dictate what they want Firo to do.
I am sure the development team can come up with a way to exclude exchanges from the vote, as for the whales, I do not think they would vote against the best interest of the project.
Whales would certainly vote in their best interest, but just as we have in current governments, banks, rich people in general - they will vote for their interests at your detriment. As we’ve gotten to see in the past. Both in the project and in real life.
[quote=“DinkBlitz, post:191, topic:2150”]
Considering what your position appears to be, I have good news for you. Reuben is stepping back. So I suppose that solves whatever issue you have with him.
[/quote]Listen, I never rule out the fact that I could be completely wrong about something when there’s even a smidgen of doubt in my head, so let me not convey the message that I’ve got a gripe with Reuben that’s causing my eyebrows to furrow. You can get general impressions of people from seeing them talk about on Youtube, but there are too many gaps in my knowledge of him and his role and influence, standing, and everything else for me to slam him hard and with conviction.
I feel like a party crasher who didn’t dress appropriately and then broke wind at the punch bowl. Maybe I shouldn’t have watched that vid before registering and then commenting. I’m mainly active on bitcointalk, but their altcoin section is a joke and there’s little to be learned there about specific coins. For what it’s worth, I’ve written more words on this forum than I have on any other altcoin forum (and I’ve only registered on two others). That’s how much Firo has captured my attention.
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Alright, that’s fair. It seemed that a lot of your seemingly negative comments about the project stemmed from Reuben and I jumped to a conclusion based on that as well as the fact that there seem to be quite a few people that have it out for Reuben for one reason or another. So I’m sorry for the snarky comment. I’m sure you’ll see that the impression you get isn’t really correct, though.
Nothing particularly wrong with you watching one of the vids, interviews, etc, and coming here to talk about it. You’re not the first to do so and you won’t be the last. I’d say more so that it feels as though while lacking knowledge and being ill-equipped, you came in rather matter-of-factly with preconceived notions about Firo while also advocating for things you had no idea about. There was a degree that I believed you may have been a troll, and one specifically to target Reuben, to be honest. So it would seem I misjudged you as well and I’m sorry about that.
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Right. 100% GPU coin for privacy
Btw, I’m not alone in sharing the opinion that coin voting alone as a governance mechanism is flawed.
Vitalik has written a comprehensive post for this that echoes many of my own opinions that I have come to independently and through experience.
Source: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/08/16/voting3.html
While I highly recommend reading the whole post, here’s some of it for convenience.
He illustrates the problems with coin-voting:
Problems with coin voting even in the absence of attackers
The problems with coin voting even without explicit attackers are increasingly well-understood (eg. see this recent piece by DappRadar and Monday Capital), and mostly fall into a few buckets:
- Small groups of wealthy participants (“whales”) are better at successfully executing decisions than large groups of small-holders. This is because of the tragedy of the commons among small-holders: each small-holder has only an insignificant influence on the outcome, and so they have little incentive to not be lazy and actually vote. Even if there are rewards for voting, there is little incentive to research and think carefully about what they are voting for.
- Coin voting governance empowers coin holders and coin holder interests at the expense of other parts of the community: protocol communities are made up of diverse constituencies that have many different values, visions and goals. Coin voting, however, only gives power to one constituency (coin holders, and especially wealthy ones), and leads to over-valuing the goal of making the coin price go up even if that involves harmful rent extraction.
- Conflict of interest issues: giving voting power to one constituency (coin holders), and especially over-empowering wealthy actors in that constituency, risks over-exposure to the conflicts-of-interest within that particular elite (eg. investment funds or holders that also hold tokens of other DeFi platforms that interact with the platform in question)
For the first point, as even illustrated even in this poll, often an individual holder especially if it’s a small investment does not have much incentive to research and think carefully about what they’re voting for.
The problem of coin holder centrism, on the other hand, is significantly more challenging: coin holder centrism is inherently baked into a system where coin holder votes are the only input. The mis-perception that coin holder centrism is an intended goal, and not a bug, is already causing confusion and harm; one (broadly excellent) article discussing blockchain public goods complains:
Can crypto protocols be considered public goods if ownership is concentrated in the hands of a few whales? Colloquially, these market primitives are sometimes described as “public infrastructure,” but if blockchains serve a “public” today, it is primarily one of decentralized finance. Fundamentally, these tokenholders share only one common object of concern: price.
The complaint is false; blockchains serve a public much richer and broader than DeFi token holders. But our coin-voting-driven governance systems are completely failing to capture that, and it seems difficult to make a governance system that captures that richness without a more fundamental change to the paradigm.
Empowering coin holders to be the only determinants of the future of the project often result in short term decisions to drive coin price up even to the detriment of longer term goals and also ignore the other parts of the community which may be significant contributors to the project in other ways, (time, development, connections, influence etc). It also stops the community from growing if individuals feel that they cannot dislodge existing coin holders or have their say.
Vitalik also talks about the weakness of coin voting in that it’s very susceptible to vote buying which has happened to many other protocols especially those in delegated proof of stake models where many just ‘sell’ their votes to whoever gives them the most returns regardless of the decision they make.
Time locks that require coins to be held for a certain time before being entitled to vote are also a stop gap solution and can be bypassed.
Some DAO protocols are using timelock techniques to limit these attacks, requiring users to lock their coins and make them immovable for some period of time in order to vote. These techniques can limit buy-then-vote-then-sell attacks in the short term, but ultimately timelock mechanisms can be bypassed by users holding and voting with their coins through a contract that issues a wrapped version of the token (or, more trivially, a centralized exchange). As far as security mechanisms go, timelocks are more like a paywall on a newspaper website than they are like a lock and key.
He proposes several potential solutions but also cautions that they come with different trade offs.
However what I want people to read is Vitalik’s conclusion that is what I’ve been saying for a long time (even before reading this article) in that coin voting alone is often just governance theatre and generally concentrates power in a few powerful coin holders. This is why it perplexes me when people say I am trying to rig/control the vote as I can safely say I am among the larger holders of Firo wielding influence that would be able to be part of this ‘elite’ which is what I have been trying to fight against.
Coin voting would empower me while enabling me to claim it’s ‘decentralized governance’ yet it isn’t my preferred choice. I’ve seen this happen in many projects and the damage it has caused.
But these are all only a few possible examples. There is much more that can be done in researching and developing non-coin-driven governance algorithms. The most important thing that can be done today is moving away from the idea that coin voting is the only legitimate form of governance decentralization . Coin voting is attractive because it feels credibly neutral: anyone can go and get some units of the governance token on Uniswap. In practice, however, coin voting may well only appear secure today precisely because of the imperfections in its neutrality (namely, large portions of the supply staying in the hands of a tightly-coordinated clique of insiders).
What I’m hoping we can do is some element of futarchy or reputation system or combination but these are highly complex systems that need serious development work. Quadratic voting such as Gitcoin is also a promising concept but also requires users to WANT to donate which is what I originally envisioned with the community fund concept but perhaps it’s a little too early to do this while the community is small and in many cases not yet mature.
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Hey @ThePhamarcist and welcome to the Firo community.
Want to clarify a few things.
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The core team is not asking for any increase despite us running in the negative. Despite quite a few community members that are ok to entrust us to a higher block reward, only one of the options proposes for a dev fund increase (and wasn’t the core team’s idea).
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The proposed community fund would have very minimal control by the core team. The only power it may have is as a casting vote or as a ‘trustee’ of the funds given that the people running the community fund may often shift. It doesn’t have a vote on how these funds are utilized though we may express an opinion given our experience. The whole point of the community fund is to empower people outside the core
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If you read through (and it may be tough given the sheer length of discussions), I’m not advocating for decimation of miners as others are. I’m questioning whether we are overpaying them given their reduced role in the security model and also the fact that they don’t seem to be taking their role of provision of security seriously (as seen as the centralization of hashrate) nor any action during the 51% attacks. Compare this to XMR’s miners which actively shifted hashrate. There’s a theory that because much of XMR’s hashrate comes from botnets, they’re the same people who are also incentivized to support XMR. Remember, it’s very easy and costless to switch to other mining pools. Our project is not alone in facing this and I’ve spoken to numerous other projects (who prefer not to be named) who are experiencing or have experienced similar issues with miners and are either figuring it our or have chosen to move to PoS completely. This is not what I’m advocating here.
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Funding independent research of privacy protocols is very costly along with development. Our privacy protocols require cryptographers, highly experienced developers and expert auditors. Most other coins don’t go through this process for this very reason. XMR even draws many of its latest developments (such as Seraphis/Triptych) from our research and even they are funded from CCS donations. Remember a lot of people got rich from XMR and because of its utility, many are also incentivized to donate to it but it hasn’t always been smooth sailing for even a project as big as XMR. A big part of Monero Research Lab disappeared due to the lack of job stability (Sarang and Surae) and most on it are working on it right now are working on it part time. Other privacy coins often just adopt XMR or ZEC’s privacy models and therefore can save this cost. The social contract of Firo/Zcoin from the beginning is that the core team will continue to push development of these technologies for Firo in return for part of the block reward which will eventually be phased out or when the community deems fit.
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I didn’t understand everything from your post about voting, except that it’s complicated.
As for the arguments of V. Butterin, they must be understood by remembering that:
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ETH: coin launched with a huge pre-mine (an ICO) which, in addition, allocated large parts of coins to different structures/people. So ETH has indeed had a problem with centrization and whales since day one.
ZCoin/Frio: no ICO, so not the same problems as ETH for whales or centralization. -
ETH at infinite inflation: this may be a problem in the context of the vote 1 coin = 1 vote
FIRO at finite inflation (21.XX million) -
ETH is the bedrock of DeFi and the excesses it allows: this is also a concern in the context of a 1 coin = 1 vote policy.
FIRO does not have this concern, or much much less. -
As far as the voting of the exchanges is concerned, it is the community that will decide whether or not to withdraw its funds from the exchanges and therefore whether or not to give them their voting rights.
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Do we know the big holders of FIROs? It doesn’t seem so many.
If the 1 FIRO = 1 vote system is not suitable, which system is better?
I don’t have an opinion yet, but two things to think about:
1) Assign votes to those who provide security.
FIRO has moved from PoW to PoW + MN and today it is the MNs that provide the biggest share of security. So what does the community think of the 1 MasterNode=1 vote proposal?
2) Assign votes to those who ensure the transactions validity:
Looking at Bitcoin, the community votes with the nodes (core-wallet, full blockchain: 400 GB): it seems to have worked well during the “block-size war”, “SegWit”, “Lightning Network” and all the others So what does the community think about the 1 Node=1 Vote proposal?
3rd proposal : a mix between the 1rst and the 2nd proposal:
3) Assign votes to those who provide security or transaction validity:
1 MasterNode=1 vote
1 node (FIRO-qt wallet with it blockchain)=1 vote
You can ponderate between MasterNode and Nodes (2 ou more votes for one and 1 vote for the other).
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I saw another article, someone proposed to destroy 7 million tokens, I think this is a bold idea, can be discussed, community vote, whether to carry out such a radical action, I want to know what you think about it?
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