Budget System v2 / Transform PR

Solarminer said:
So what do you think had the most effect on Dash price in the last month?

Bitcoin double spend post by Peter Todd (do you remember the huge bitcoin drop)
Evolution Release
Miami Conference - Paypal like payments announced
InstantX added to 3 mobile wallets
Electrum wallets released
Dash N Drink and several articles specifically about it.
Cryptsy Collapse with announcement no more Dash is getting sold.
Transform - Articles on online sites

If we don't have proof that that was Terpin, then we can't assume it. There are a lot of other PR companies. Don't get attached because we hired them for 3 weeks which just so happens to be when Dash was very active with events and activities.
Click to expand...

Not trying to butt heads here and I hear ya, but my point is that nobody knows. Some are assuming that Terpin was garbage without any proof. Some are assuming it's due to the DnD machine (which was killer btw Solar) with no proof.

Several of those points above are just fluff to make the list bigger.

BTC double spend post - Without him mentioning DASH as a solution, it means nothing in terms of price increase.
Evolution release - This honestly makes me want to run away, highly doubtful it caused a price increase.....perhaps it will in the future, but not yet.
I also doubt people were like "OMG there's an electrum wallet and InstantX in their mobile wallets for DASH now, we better buy!"
Cryptsy.......well that might explain the negative pressure for a period there.....but what about the trojan guy dumping his coins for profits? What's the difference? That dumper still exists.

You just can't measure everything. And I feel it was a result of everything.

Using TDG's reasoning, we should just toss anything in the trash that costs "us" money and that's what I had issue with.
 
Jeztah said:
Not trying to butt heads here and I hear ya, but my point is that nobody knows. Some are assuming that Terpin was garbage without any proof. Some are assuming it's due to the DnD machine (which was killer btw Solar) with no proof.

Several of those points above are just fluff to make the list bigger.

BTC double spend post - Without him mentioning DASH as a solution, it means nothing in terms of price increase.
Evolution release - This honestly makes me want to run away, highly doubtful it caused a price increase.....perhaps it will in the future, but not yet.
I also doubt people were like "OMG there's an electrum wallet and InstantX in their mobile wallets for DASH now, we better buy!"
Cryptsy.......well that might explain the negative pressure for a period there.....but what about the trojan guy dumping his coins for profits? What's the difference? That dumper still exists.

You just can't measure everything. And I feel it was a result of everything.

Using TDG's reasoning, we should just toss anything in the trash that costs "us" money and that's what I had issue with.
Click to expand...

Agree we don't know what contributed to the price increase. But 3 weeks of PR is pretty minimal to determine if the value was there or not. I would expect a PR company to come back with real page counts from their articles, real hits to dash.org and other real metrics.

The spreadsheet is pretty fishy. They are claiming 6.5 Million Views. This is crazy.

Look at this cointelegraph article:
http://cointelegraph.com/news/dash-...to-bitcoin-offered-by-the-lamassu-atm-project
The page counter says it has 1009 views. I believe that. I don't believe the 1,000,000 views Transform is claiming.
 
I am not sure if I am on board with this proposal. Please do not try to ram this through with a quick release.

There absolutely must be a way for the DASH network to immediately exit a long term contract. If a contractor violates the terms of a contract by not delivering the services, or if they fall off a cliff, the network needs to be able to terminate, I don't see any way around this. You are concerned that DASH needs to honor its agreements, but the DASH network *never made* a multi-month agreement with Transform-PR. *You* were the one who did that. The nature of the budgeting system as it stands currently makes binding multi-month contracts with the network impossible. Transform-PR should not have been led to the false impression that the DASH network had actually agreed to a multi-month contract when this was never the case and could not have been the case.

I don't mind necessarily having a network representative help facilitate a contract, but do we need to have network representatives create legally binding contracts? If there is to be a way for the DASH network to exit a contract (which there must be), the only thing this accomplishes is to put the network representative at legal risk.

I would very much like multi-month contracts to happen on the DASH network. But I think this approach is a bit radical. Perhaps we could have a higher voting threshold, sure, but it still has to be un-doable.
 
I would like to ask If a proposal (let say Proposal A) need 300 DASH (100 DASH per month) and is a three month proposal will it be funded if the following happen
1. First month have only 80 DASH remaining
2.Second month have only 80 DASH remaining
....etc.
 
Jeztah said:
I need to look at the spreadsheet to hopefully see the source of that claim. Depending on where that number comes from, it's not that outrageous.
Click to expand...

Actually it is kind of outrageous. There is no way that this article http://cointelegraph.com/news/dash-...to-bitcoin-offered-by-the-lamassu-atm-project
has 1,000,000 views. The page's own view counter says 1009 total views and 333 shares, and there are 10 comments on the article. No way in hell it has a million views. Maybe if you count all page views on the cointelegraph homepage where someone might happen to see the article without clicking on it, even that might be a stretch, and in that case we would be double counting with the other cointelegraph article which supposedly has another 1,000,000.
 
TroyDASH said:
Actually it is kind of outrageous. There is no way that this article http://cointelegraph.com/news/dash-...to-bitcoin-offered-by-the-lamassu-atm-project
has 1,000,000 views. The page's own view counter says 1009 total views and 333 shares, and there are 10 comments on the article. No way in hell it has a million views.
Click to expand...
Right! If Transform was close to honest about this type of reporting I could look past it. But this looks like outright dishonesty.

It appears the Superior Swarm Intelligence may have been right on this one.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I created an account just to echo what everyone has echoed. There must be a way to cancel the contract. It is pretty simple. In any contract made between the network and service provider stipulate that if 75% vote no then it will be cancelled. That way they know at least 25% need to be voting yes at any one time.

Otherwise, you will get situations where service providers do nothing and continue to receive money. After all, there is no way to hold them accountable. They won't be sued by the "network" and they are 100% guaranteed the money unlike in a normal situation where the money would stop and it would be up to the service provider to decide to file suit or not.

I will personally vote no on any contract that has no way to be cancelled. And, if such contracts do managed to get approved I would likely just sell all my dash because such contracts will essentially destroy dash from within as zombie contracts that the community does not support begin to accumulate.
 
Solarminer said:
Right! If Transform was close to honest about this type of reporting I could look past it. But this is outright dishonesty.

It appears the Superior Swarm Intelligence may have been right on this one.
Click to expand...
I checked, the spreadsheet is listing reported site overall page views or "potential" sets of eyes. Not specific article/page views like you would like to see.

It's more of a gauge used to determine the "worth" of having an ad or article there.

(are we going off topic?)
 
eduffield said:
Hello,

I’m guessing most of the community is aware that we had a 3-month contract with Transform PR that started last month. This contract was for $6000, denominated in Dash and locked into a rate of $3.38. I believe this contract was going really well and that we were making the correct choice when we originally went with Transform PR. At the end of the first month, some vocal members of the community began lobbying to remove the Transform PR contract from the system while it was active.

I would like to post some evidence of the ongoing work that Transform was doing for us at the time the contract was voided and make some suggestions to alter the system so that we have better communication and we don’t experience problems like this again in the future.

To start, I’m posting the final report from Transform PR, which shows the work they were doing. As you can see, they were the major driver of most of the media attention we were getting during the last month. They were even working with a major mainstream media outlet, Reuters, to publish a story on Dash.

December Transform PR Activity
Proposal For Next Contract

As a decentralized autonomous organization we need to be able to work with outside vendors reliably, so when the network makes a decision to fund a contract, we need to be able to support that decision in an irrevocable way. I believe the budget system failed us and it needs to be altered slightly to support this type of arrangement in the future.

(...)

What’s Next?

During the time Transform PR was an active contract, they did fantastic work for us. I would really like to work with them again after we have irrevocable contracts, which will be available in 12.1. Transform PR has provided us with the plan they were going to use from March through May, which I have posted in order to give the community an idea of what our future work with them (if approved after 12.1) would look like.

Creating and fully testing a new version of the software will take about six months. The good news, however, is that while we’re working on 12.1, we also have a separate development team led by Andy Freer doing work on Dash Evolution. Because of this, 12.1 shouldn’t delay the release of Dash Evolution. We are right on schedule.

Best,

Evan Duffield
Click to expand...

I was sad to see what happened in this case, especially because of (what from my point of view was) DASH's breach of contract, to the detriment of the "Transform PR" works. (I could hardly believe.)

This must not become the "standard behaviour" of this community. It can only bring nefarious consequences against us.

Pacta sunt servanda, is a basic rule. The parts in a contract must keep the agreement. It's a good faith principle that a signed contract must be observed, and no part is allowed to ignore, break or abandon their commitments without a fair and due cause, notably when the other part is keeping its word.

It's shameful. And if such (considered "irresponsible") acts become frequent, no one will ever trust our community, or will want to do business with DASH, leaving us with a tarnished image.

Successful contracts demand at least a minimum level of legal security for both parts in order to flourish, The involved agents must trust each other. Dash will lose too much if it loses in trustworthiness.

The fact that the contract is denominated in USD (or in any local currency) and there is a significant increase or decrease in DASH's price on the exchanges is never enough reason to simply vote down our monthly budget commitment, in cases when the other part been successful in keeping his agreed part:

If there's a huge price up difference, there's always the possibility that, once (and only when) the total proposed USD amount is successfully paid, the community will vote down the payments (but the other part will still have the obligation to completelly meet its part of the deal);

If there's a huge price down difference, what can be done is, after proof of conclusion of its works an additional payment will be approved to the other part.

If the proposal is denominated in DASH, even better: "huge price differences" will make no difference, ideally.

Now, in cases when the other part cleary does not fulfil his obligation, it's obvious that the community must have the power to cease the payments due. But it would demand that IN FACT, the other part is not doing its part of the agreement. It should not be a matter of some member bringing generic accusations of the kind... "I don't like him"... "he is too ugly"... "he did not do his homework once in school, because I knew it"... etc... Such "accusations" must be brought BEFORE the approval of the budget, during the "voting" opportunity. It makes no sense to wait for a whole month of contract and works to start ad hoc accusations :rolleyes:

Anyway, a problem I see is in cases when a "better proposal" come up to be voted, and receives more votes from the community, driving down previous contracts. And, the "Contracts" solution, as proposed above, seems to be a good "protection" in cases like these, avoiding the risk of an unfair breach of contracts caused by DASH's system.

From what I can see, our voting system is working great. The problem, it seems, is "the community is still learning" to use this powerful tool responsibly.
 
The DASH ceasing payments to fund Transform-PR was not a breach of contract on the part of the network. The network never made any agreement to guarantee funding for multiple months because it is impossible to do that in the current budget system. Part of the problem here was that the causes for contract termination were not explicitly outlined in the proposal, so DASH was really not under any particular pressure to continue funding it. I think a huge chunk of this problem can be alleviated by having much more well defined contracts without even having to touch the protocol.

I agree that de-funding a budget item should typically require a higher "no" threshold than the "yes" amount required to pass it, to prevent items from just barely passing and then being right on the bubble of being defunded.. Perhaps the threshold required, instead of being hard-coded, can be agreed upon in the initial proposal?

Then there is the issue of over-budgeting which can cause other items to fall off, which is something we also need to deal with and is part of what Evan is trying to work with in this proposal. I'm just not convinced that the way Evan proposed it is the best way --
 
In regards to the proposal amount being 50 Dash to reimburse for the proposal payments on prior rejected proposals, and since this topic is about changing the proposal structure to add a new option "contracts".

I was wondering if it might also be useful to have an option for "polls" since proposals are already being used this way? In this case the "poll" contract could send the 5 dash payment back to a change address after the poll closes. This would have allowed Evan to test the communities desire to collect unspent budget units without needing to create another proposal to reimburse his payments.

Although I'm not a developer, so I don't know how much more work I'm suggesting, the only down side I can see is that bad actors could use our system to spam us.
 
If we are talking about v2 of the budgeting system I hope we don't leave out the following:

1) Higher voting threshold to see any proposals pass. I think the current limits are far to easy for the core people to simply vote through whatever they want based on the amounts of dash held. I think this at least warrants a discussion.

2) What is done with the unused funds. This is another piece of the puzzle that to me warrants a discussion. So far we have decided to not create upwards of 3 masternode's worth of funds that could be helping us in a lot of ways. I don't mind the idea of rolling them over to the next month. Or maybe moving them into a type of fund to pay for bug bounty's like other open source companies do but i think so far the reasons I've heard for why we are choosing to not create these funds aren't really reasonable.

3) Better documentation for outlining all the scenario's for the budgeting system. I think this last month was quite an interesting one from a stand point of the budgeting system. We have controversial things like the transform pr, we have late proposal's getting submitted not making the threshold, we had proposals stacking up with people not knowing why they did or didn't get funded. If this system is going to get more widely used I think it warrants some better documentation regarding all the inner workings of it.

4) What ever happened to the fancy website that was supposed to be created to submit proposals and stuff. Sort of like what dashwhale turned into but there was originally plans for this to be a site controlled by the core team or foundation is that still in the mix?

5) In the comments of one proposal you asked for some quite explicit answers regarding a proposals purpose and intentions much more then has ever been provided for any current proposals. If this is the type of explanation you'd like to see for proposals it would make sense to lead by example.

You mentioned the following...
(QUOTE)
Here’s some of our main concerns:

We don’t know what’s happening to the vending machine that was already made, who owns this vending machine and what’s the plan for it?
What are you going to be purchasing with the $3000? Can you give us an itemized breakdown?
Can you give us a plan on how you aim to use these funds each month?
Would it be possible to come up with milestones for this project? What are you planning on accomplishing? How will it benefit the ecosystem?
Are you planning on selling vending machines, components of them eventually, or something like this? Who will earn these rewards?

I would assume if the masternode network is funding your operation, it should receive a cut of the profits each quarter paid out as dividends. I would like to also establish some sort of agreement between yourselves and the Darkcoin foundation as well to make that agreement official.
(END QUOTE)

These are all valid requests but if you'd like to see them for all proposals then we should talk about that. We also bring up the discussion of what to do with stuff created by the network who gets ownership and such. I think elaborating on these is reasonable for a v2 product as well.

6) Double spending of proposal funds. During the mess last month it came out that some of the Transform PR proposal was getting funding by the PR awareness campaign and some of it was from it's own proposal. To me this type of double dipping shouldn't be possible and if it is it should be at least voted on by the network. To think that someone made the decision to take funds from another proposal and allocate them to one that was missing funds is absurd.

Overview
I'm sure there are more pieces that need to be discussed but if you are going to open the can of worms and talk about version 2.0 I hope you are willing to openly discuss the other area's where the current system is lacking.

I would also like to see a more detailed discussion about why the one month of the budget wasn't paid out and what exactly transpired there. It's easy to jump to the conclusion that you guys were just down in miami getting gigy with it and forgot to flip the switch but I didn't even know some manual process existed for the budget finalization and recently you did mention some sort of quorum needed to decentralize this process. Could you please elaborate on this?

Edit: Sorry about all the edits just keep thinking of more things and seeing stuff I messed up.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
coingun said:
I would also like to see a more detailed discussion about why the one month of the budget wasn't paid out and what exactly transpired there. It's easy to jump to the conclusion that you guys were just down in miami getting gigy with it and forgot to flip the switch but I didn't even know some manual process existed for the budget finalization and recently you did mention some sort of quorum needed to decentralize this process. Could you please elaborate on this?
Click to expand...

See this thread https://dashtalk.org/threads/budget-glitch.7246/
I am not sure if the problem (if there is not decentralized finalization) was ever addressed? I am sure Evan can speak to this --
 
I've apologized elsewhere, but I want to say I feel so guilty about Transform PR's contract getting nixed. I remember earlier last week, I was surprised to learn the way the agreement was set up, and didn't like the idea of long term contracts paying out in Dash - or at least I didn't understand the contract and was surprised at how it was to be paid out. And this was when we were feeling the pinch of not enough funds to pay for all the great proposals. But I have since realized great uses for paying out in Dash as it can give great incentives for a contractor to perform as well as possible. It's a lot like paying in stocks, etc... to a CEO, or other workers in a business. Then, I disappeared and came back to the mess. I don't imagine myself as being important enough to cause this, but hate that my voice could have contributed to the mess. I'm so sorry, so much was happening at the time, a lot of negativity, that kinda made me unconsciously pull away and concentrate on other things at home.

On the other hand, I was always worried about the budget system becoming flaky if voters turned on a contractor without cause, so having this happen early may have been a blessing, though I'm sorry about it. I sure hope Transform PR will give us another try with the new budget system. Thanks Evan for putting your nose to the grind stone and finding a solution! I like this solution!

Andy Freer joined us full time in December, no? Wow, I had no idea he was taking over Evolution, and have to say that knowing the quality of help that you have, Evan, in such talented programmers, and also all the guys doing marketing, they're awesome. It's because you're such an awesome person that you've attracted these guys! Too cool, and it isn't a small thing to know a major update is being headed, not by the Founder of Dash, but rather one of our core team members. It shows Evan isn't a control freak. I get this feeling that the core team is also becoming diverse in a very meaningful way. I mean, do you all understand what I'm attempting to say? It's like Evan isn't (really hasn't been for a while, but still felt like) the only programmer with everyone else just doing small things. He's leading a real diverse and talented team. I think this is the first solid evidence of that and shouldn't be missed by the community :)
 
coingun said:
We don’t know what’s happening to the vending machine that was already made, who owns this vending machine and what’s the plan for it?
What are you going to be purchasing with the $3000? Can you give us an itemized breakdown?
Can you give us a plan on how you aim to use these funds each month?
Would it be possible to come up with milestones for this project? What are you planning on accomplishing? How will it benefit the ecosystem?
Are you planning on selling vending machines, components of them eventually, or something like this? Who will earn these rewards?
Click to expand...
The Dash N Drink is at Camosoul's. The purpose was to show it at the Miami show, it wasn't intended to be used for profits. If you have a place or event you want to bring it to display it, coordinate with Camosoul.

The Vendor-Experience proposal was not voted in.

You made some other good points.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top