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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Anyone can create a poll or new thread and have the community open a poll for it though I think the proposal needs further thought.
The masternode yields and mining rewards what happens then?
This is not destruction of supply, this is cutting emissions of future supply and acceleration of emissions which is a different thing. If price doesn’t increase from destruction of future supply, you effectively destroyed the ecosystem since there would be no rewards to give to the ecosystem unless you expect it to be supported by fees alone (which with current transaction levels are unsustainable).
As I stated in other places, I don’t believe that fees alone can support a blockchain network. I actually believe Bitcoin will be facing this issue in a few years and have to re-evaluate the 21 million coins limit as they will realize Bitcoin price cannot go up forever and fees are insufficient to support miners which is why I’m favor of a tail emission like Monero. We have seen this same problem with NEM’s supernode system before.
I did suggest that people should consider whether acceleration of emission is a good idea for example dropping the block time but keeping rewards the same.
Also would recommend that people open the right thread for this rather than mixing proposals up in different topics (for e.g. I saw this post in my ‘Stepping back’ post)
This is why Daniel Larimer (co-founder of bitshares, steemit, EOS, & the guy who is behind the term DAO) developed EDEN to help communities come to a consensus and make decisions instead of using coin voting (which has really screwed EOS). It works really well (I’m part of it), but it’s certainly not a privacy-centered process. It requires that all members expose their identity to an extent and then participate in a “fractal democracy” election process to promote those members in the community most equipped and with the best ideas to the top into the positions to govern. Those who are at the end of the process are the ones who get assigned the pool of funds and can pursue their projects. This is actually what I recommend we use for the community fund. It has worked pretty well so far and has evolved into the fractally project: the sort of Eden 2.0 which fixes a lot of the original limitations.
Might be something worthwhile to take a look into. I can connect you with the team behind it (who are fans of FIRO already) if needed. Maybe there is a tweak which can be made to maintain privacy and yet benefit from the fractal democracy process.
In fact, one could argue that those in positions of leadership or involvement should give up a bit if not all anonymity. Bold statement, yes yes, but we’re talking about what has worked for humans throughout our evolution. If you want to vote, show who you are and that we can trust you, etc etc.
Anyway… Not really related to this thread/poll, just wanted to mention it as an option. What’s the next steps for this poll?
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Wait for time to expire then make a decision on how to interpret the poll results. Not an enviable task.
If we are going to have another more refined poll after this, I don’t think it should be a whole month again. Maybe 1-2 weeks.
Definitely, would be a short vote if any. How does everyone feel about that?
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I think time is against us.
FIRO’s price keeps dropping and it’s so low that even the development team can’t afford it. The urgency today is to act to raise the price of FIRO. For 6 years, the priority has been the technique and it is this technique that seduces many of us. But for this technique to continue to progress, it must be financed in a sustainable way and this requires a higher price from FIRO.
So, for me, it is urgent to redistribute the block-reward, for example on the basis of the 3 votes coming first. In the following months, we can refine with other votes/proposals/updates if we wish.
1-2 weeks more wouldn’t kill anything vs face a disgruntled community and accusations that core team didn’t do the poll correctly.
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137 voters is not representative at all, and this proposal goes against core zcoin principles
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But isn’t everything dropping? I personally wouldn’t make rushed decisions based on price… No matter what we do we’d be in a down position.
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