A proposal now costs over $3,000

TL;DR: 5 DASH fee is not only anti-spam, it's also limits the total number of proposals and incentivizes larger/cumulative proposals. And it does its job well IMO.
Should it be changed? Shall we allow a flow of smaller proposals? Well, I doubt it tbh, see below.

IMO, the 5 DASH fee is only high if:
- you ask for comparable amount of money and such use of a Treasury makes no sense;
- your proposal is simply relatively small comparing to the overall ~6650 DASH available.

Think of Treasury as of a way for money multiplication - you put 5 DASH in and you get 5xN DASH out to cover the fee and all your costs to deliver results and also to make some (reasonable) profit. So the question for each proposal is "Is my N large enough?". If N is 1-2 it's obvious that no, it's too low and not worth it. For N around 4-5 it's getting interesting IMO. But it really works the best (in a sense that the fee doesn't really matter if you can pull this kind of proposal off) for N > 10. Note, that you can fit 133 (N == 10) proposals in current budget and that's already would be a lot of work to review this. At current prices (N == 10) is $30k and IMO it matches the term "reasonably sized proposal" for $4m budget pretty well. For (N < 4-5, $12-15k) proposals there probably should be some DAO managing them like DashForce or smth similar, there is no way MNOs can review 250+ single proposals of this size IMO. There is indeed a problem that tiny proposals are already economically excluded while there is not enough of mid/large size proposals yet. In my mind, this is simply a result of a way too fast growth - it's hard for people to go from "printing stickers in a garage" to "manage a team of 10+ people" in 1 year. Some may never be able to do this, not everyone can be an entrepreneur, it's ok. This however should incentivize everyone (MNOs in the first place) to look for opportunities outside of the "safe zone" (small meetup proposals, etc) and should force people to try to reach out to some existing businesses or hot startups to establish some kind of partnership (pick your favorite one here) and/or collaborate (e.g. 1 DashForce instead of 10s of single meetup proposals).

NOTE: don't get me wrong, "printing stickers in a garage" and "small meetup" are perfectly fine, they just don't scale horizontally - you have to build some structure around them to scale, that's how they become "manage a team of 10+ people" and "DashForce-like DAO".

Pietro Speroni said:
When the fee was low there was a much lower amount of money available.
I have three possible suggestions:

1) masternode vote which proposals do not get back their fee. So the votes become (Yes, Abstain, No, No and do not get back the fee)
the last one only used for spammy proposals. And from then on we stop people adding the proposal fee to the cost of the proposal
2) the fee must be proportional to the money you are asking. If you ask n dash, then the fee will be n/k (and we need to decide what would have to be k, but we can just pick the average of the last period)
3) people use the fee they want, but proposals are ordered by fee spent.
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Interesting ideas, few comments:
1) We could probably use another "signal" for that e.g. "endorsed" which is not used right now (we only use "funding" for manual voting now). So it would be smth like adding a rule "if AbsoluteYesCount for `endorsed` is < 0 then withhold the fee otherwise pay fee back automatically". This would separate funding support from actual anti-spam actions by MNOs a bit more clearly IMO and should already fit into existing vote structure.
2) I'm not sure it's a good idea, see the logic about money multiplicator above
3) Same as #2 plus it complicates things a lot IMO - there is no priority/sort order right now and I wouldn't agree that 10 DASH project spending 5 DASH as a fee is more important than 20 DASH project spending 4 DASH as a fee for example.
 
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I like the idea that any proposals with more 'Yes' than 'No' votes should be refunded (even if the proposal does not pass).

This means the proposer is on the right track but needs to make some improvements and revisions to get it passed in the future.
 
Nanolucas said:
I like the idea that any proposals with more 'Yes' than 'No' votes should be refunded (even if the proposal does not pass).

This means the proposer is on the right track but needs to make some improvements and revisions to get it passed in the future.
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This is a government decision, but who is gonna paid 5 dash for it?

@GrandMasterDash used to pay to ask governance questions, without having any personal gain. But this era is gone. Nowdays, everybody who is posting proposals he is doing it for his personal profit, and many reasonable governance proposals which have no personal benefit but benefit for the community, have not even the chance to be voted, as long as nobody proposes them in the budget system due to the existance of the high and hardcoded proposal fee (instead of having an adaptive fee)

Yet another proof that there is a structured methodology of the spies in order to destroy the governance of dash.
 
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Hey guys, I have a small dev team and I didn't know that it costs 5 Dash to post a proposal. Thats an insane amount to get advice. I would say that the price has discouraged some of my teammates to the point where we are maybe considering other platforms.

Here's some honest feedback and a look into a dev team trying to find a platform to build our product on top of. I love dash, I'm trying to defend my decision to spend a large amount of $$ on an idea submission.

Here's our strategy:

I set out to put in 5k of my own money to start from scratch to build our product to work with dash. Great niche products come from scrappy entrepreneurs like our team.

I get the incentive structure, but that price is getting lofty almost like an expensive conference that only the elite can afford.

Here's what $3,000 will take away:

- Legal advice
- Stripe Atlas
- Product video
- Higher level design comps
- Narrator for our video etc

I'll have to do things cheaper, how does this actually make your community better or our product better? Why wouldn't I just take the chance of submitting our idea somewhere else???

A first world problem is having "too many proposals of interested people". Having people submitting ideas or gaining interest in your platform is the MOST IMPORTANT THING you need for growth.

Some of the solutions you shouldn't consider:

- 5 dash, refund only 4 if you don't succeed. BAD - Say you reject my proposal and I spend $100, no big deal. If I lose $500 dollars for submitting an idea and I don't get it back, I would say the odds of me ever returning to the platform are less than 10%.

- Full Refund - Bad - just gonna get spammed.

Solutions to consider:

- 0.1 DASH ($50): The people that will create a company that could push dash into the mainstream is probably going to be a group of college kids. I'm not, but thats when I started my first company. Time after time, young entrepreneurs with no cash create products that are life changing.

- People will buy dash, thats exactly what you want to showcase the technology.

Think of AWS - 95% of startups fail, but 99% build on top of AWS. 5% of companies succeed, but every single one of those people with an idea now has AWS experience and may bring those skillsets to their next company.
 
UdjinM6 said:
1) We could probably use another "signal" for that e.g. "endorsed" which is not used right now (we only use "funding" for manual voting now). So it would be smth like adding a rule "if AbsoluteYesCount for `endorsed` is < 0 then withhold the fee otherwise pay fee back automatically". This would separate funding support from actual anti-spam actions by MNOs a bit more clearly IMO and should already fit into existing vote structure.
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Hi @UdjinM6 , thanks for replying me. If the system needs to lower the number of proposals that are considered it means that the governance is too centralised, and we have to redesign it (I am available, you know). We don't need all masternodes to evaluate all the proposals. The system can randomly select some masternode to evaluate some proposals. So each proposal is always evaluated by at least x masternodes (x > 100). And the bigger the fee requested is, the more masternode need to evaluate it. So I would say that the fee structure should only be to prevent spam. If not we are tying our own legs. Basically this is telling me that DASH is working much better than all the other systems. We have much more money available than other systems, there are a lot of ideas how to use this money. But masternodes are unable to follow all of those proposals and have become the bottleneck. To avoid this you force people to pay 3000$ for each proposal. What a terrible idea!

So, accepted that the fee is only to stop spam, proposals fall into 4 categories:
  • Yes absolutely,
  • maybe,
  • No absolutely but thanks for asking,
  • you are spamming me and I will punish you.
And you say that the only one that should be fee free are the ones in the first category. Sorry this is a terrible proposal because it stops people from suggesting new revolutionary ideas that they don't know if they will be accepted. We need to be free to say no without punishing people for asking a question. People need to be free to ask questions without fear of having to pay oscene amount of money for it.
 
Pietro Speroni said:
We don't need all masternodes to evaluate all the proposals. The system can randomly select some masternode to evaluate some proposals. So each proposal is always evaluated by at least x masternodes (x > 100). And the bigger the fee requested is, the more masternode need to evaluate it.
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You made the same assumption that @UdjinM6 did. That the proposals should be judged in a limited time frame, then expire and be rejected for ever.

UdjinM6 said:
... there is no way MNOs can review 250+ single proposals of this size IMO. .
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There is no way, as long as the proposals expire within a month. But proposals should never expire, should always be available to be voted. And the MNOs should be allowed to browse the proposal tree and vote an old or a new proposal, whithout time constrains.

demo said:
No proposal should be rejected or expire. All proposals should stay always alive (and classified in a proposal tree), waiting for a (predecided/voted) threshold of YES votes to be reached in order for them to be able to get funded by the monthly budget. This system will always spend 100% of the available money.
Click to expand...
 
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demo said:
No proposal should be rejected. All proposals should stay always alive (and classified in a proposal tree), waiting for a (predecided/voted) threshold of YES votes to be reached in order for them to be able to get funded by the monthly budget. This system will always spend 100% of the available money.
.
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That's a completely different model. And an interesting one. I would't just agree to it as I would need to see the consequences. Like what if people suggest things that are not neutral or beneficial to the dash network, but hinder it. You might not want to find those proposals even if they were the only one to remain. Also money that is not used is not printed. And the less money is printed, the more the dash value will grow. So some masternodes might decide that a proposal is not worth the inflation it induces.

In the meantime proposals expire. That is how the system works right now, so it is not an assumption, it is an observation.
 
Pietro Speroni said:
That's a completely different model. And an interesting one. I would't just agree to it as I would need to see the consequences. Like what if people suggest things that are not neutral or beneficial to the dash network, but hinder it. You might not want to find those proposals even if they were the only one to remain.
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The YES threshold could be defined as a percentage of the total MNO population. In case people tend to suggest bad things in the proposal tree, this adaptive and voted YES threshold could increase, in order for the proposals to be able to be reviewed by more MNOs. In that case of course, and as long as the precentage of the YES votes is (adaptively) voted by the MNOs to be too high, then there is no garanty that 100% of the monthly budget will be spend. But if we allow the MNOs to vote this threshold number repeatedly and adaptively, then they will finally discover the optimal equilibrium that fits the best to the current community needs.

Pietro Speroni said:
Also money that is not used is not printed. And the less money is printed, the more the dash value will grow. So some masternodes might decide that a proposal is not worth the inflation it induces.
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I dont understand this argument. The proposal tree will allow searching, tags, and classification. So no need to browse it all. Each masternode could browse only the part of the branch that he is specialized to it, or interested in it, and delegate to another masternode the rest of the branch.
 
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demo said:
I dont understand this argument. The proposal tree will allow searching, tags, and classification. So no need to browse it all. Each masternode could browse only the part of the branch that he is specialized to it, or interested in it, and delegate to another masternode the rest of the branch.
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If you did not understand it, I should try to explain it better, or at least differently. In every moment the value of a coin is given by the point of encounter between the request for it, and the availability. The more people want it the more the price goes up, the more is available the more the price goes down. When we print money we raise the availability so we tend to lower the value of all the dash. If the money is spent in a good way, this will increase the number of people that want to have dash, so although the new money is diminishing the value, the extra people is raising the value more than the new money is diminishing the value.

Now Masternodes in general want to raise the value of Dash. But printing money is an inflationary action, it tend to lower the value of money. So they should only accept proposals that bring more people to the dash network (raising the value) then are inflating the currency.

Is it clear now :) ?
 
I have been saying to lower the proposal fee since it was $500. I think even when it was $20 it worked just as good as today.

We have to reward the great idea not punish them. I think what we really need is the mechanism to fund slowly

as the proposals being done instead of worrying about spamming.


We should encourage great ideas.

Even hire a team to select great ideas from pre proposals could be great.
 
Another option to consider would just be to scale the proposal fee based on the amount being requested.

A flat fee of 5 DASH will likely always be too high (or potentially even too low) depending on the market valuation of DASH at the time of the proposal. Whether people want to admit it or not, people will always think of the proposals in terms of whatever their local fiat currency is and so the 'cost' of any proposal will vary as the exchange rate goes up and down.

The solution is to fix the proposal fee to be a percentage of the DASH requested. I think a reasonable amount would be 1%.

Examples:

1) "Dash Aerosports" requesting 1366 DASH would need to put down a proposal deposit of 13.66 DASH
2) "Introduction of Dash to Estonia" requesting 21 DASH would need to put down a proposal deposit of 0.21 DASH
3) "Koodaa" requesting 118 DASH for 6 months would need to put down a proposal deposit of 7.08 DASH

If we're worried that this would flood the system with low effort proposals for small amounts, we could set a floor of 1 DASH, but there should never be a ceiling so that the more outlandish the requests, the more the proposer has at stake.
 
The proposal fee is a spam mechanism; varying the price based on the amount requested just makes attacks and spamming cheaper.

What we need is a mechanism to make proposal fees competitive while reigning in the number of proposals submitted. One way is to let MNOs become Proposal Agents; give them a reduced fee (one per cycle), and let them make profit from proposal services e.g. proposal formulation, translation services, escrow etc. My point is, there's a bunch of enhancements that could be made to proposals but there is no incentive or marketplace for it. Let's put in place the mechanisms that encourage that marketplace.
 
GrandMasterDash said:
What we need is a mechanism to make proposal fees competitive while reigning in the number of proposals submitted. One way is to let MNOs become Proposal Agents; give them a reduced fee (one per cycle), and let them make profit from proposal services e.g. proposal formulation, translation services, escrow etc. My point is, there's a bunch of enhancements that could be made to proposals but there is no incentive or marketplace for it. Let's put in place the mechanisms that encourage that marketplace.
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And who is gonna pay 5 dash to propose this in the budget system? Nobody! Thats why dash's governance sucks. Because all proposals target to the personal profit, instead of the community profit. The spies are deliberately skyrocketing dash's price, in order to destroy the element that turns dash dangerous for them, which is the effective Governance. The greedy dash generation of 2014-2016 may are rich now, but you sold your soul to the devil. And the devil will devore you. You will not survive without effective governance for sure. Your end is determined by the structured methodology of the spies. They used your greed as a trap.
 
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I have an idea, I'm just throwing it out there.

What if Dash had a lower stake system? Like 100 Dash to become a Dash citizen, with a small proof of stake payment to compensate for holding the Dash. Citizens vote on proposals, whatever makes it past the first round goes to the masternodes to vote? It's how a lot of Democratic Republics work, they have a lower house and upper Parliament or Senate. It's just an idea, maybe flawed but worth a discussion.
 
I really liked the idea of having an option for giving the Dash back with "no, it's just a proposal that is not there yet" or "more yes than no", but I think that would need a protocol change and require a large effort for a non-critical problem.
The proposals are coming and it's true there are lots of options to discuss and get feedback before making a real proposal in the system.

Although I agree the fee is currently very expensive, the stakes are also a lot higher and the proposals are still coming in. I don't think it's critical.
 
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