December 2015 Budget Proposal

I'm sorry to seem so lazy, LOL, but I'm also getting confused. Could you please put up the information on which proposals are ready to be voted on? Thanks :)
 
I am unhappy with the way this month's proposals were made for a few reasons. You can already see from the previous posts that some doubt and uncertainty is creeping in and I hope this is nipped in the bud.

Rushed Proposal Post and Sparse Details on IaBITCconf Video

You can tell that the last post was rushed and I know that it is tedious to get these things up but for transparency, effort should be put into this. Compare how detailed the first post for budget proposals was made.

For example, laBITconf Video Advertising Budget - $3120
Is this purely for advertising budget only to promote a video of you talking at the conference? Not very much details as to how this USD 3120 is to be spent.
I don't this would be an appropriate video to spend so much money to promote. As in your own published stats, there is a huge drop off in audience retention for longer videos and videos of people talking at conferences aren't the right type of videos to be spending money on to promote.
More details please (as echoed by previous posters).

Dash.org Domain

Although I agree on the importance of obtaining dash.org domain and maybe even the price, in a way this was done without asking the community if they were willing to fund it and is instead after the fact. For this particular instance I understand why this was done as this deal needed to be completed quickly or kept quiet to prevent other people from trying to derail the deal. So to be clear, I understand why this was done in this way but just some caution...

I just would hope that these type of scenarios are kept to a minimum and that if where possible, it should be placed in a budget proposal first. Otherwise this may raise questions as to how come the developers are so willing to come up money, whether it's cause they really have belief in the project or is it cause they control a huge chunk of masternodes and are therefore confident that they would be reimbursed.

Liquidity Providers

I hope this is a short term interim thing rather than throwing money at a problem for short term functionality. An ETA on a solution for this or some updates on the situation here would be appreciated.

I am thankful for the work Eduffield and the rest of the Dash team has put in and believe that they are acting with good intentions in putting forward these proposals. I also highly commend the Dash Project Expenses Community Report and hope it is kept updated to monitor progress. Let's not make it into another almost defunct Dash Foundation.

So let's not cut any corners and put proper effort into these budget proposal posts as these things can be sensitive.

If Eduffield is busy, perhaps another Dash member can help flesh out these posts in more detail before they go live.
 
And as I mentioned in prior post, OP lists 3rd item as Bitcoin Wednesday for 667.31 Dash, but no proposal has been submitted for this.

Is that simply listed in OP in error? Or is it to be a December budget proposal? If so, maybe just a brief, general description of what it is for.
 
I agree 100% his opinion. What i see is the budget is overspent to something we dont really know where it goes....it should consult with community for every spend that have made and check the result to see is it worth or not.

If we really want to go big...we need to convince outside world about dash...but before that we need to convince our community that we are on the right track.
 
BolehVPN said:
Liquidity Providers
I hope this is a short term interim thing rather than throwing money at a problem for short term functionality. An ETA on a solution for this or some updates on the situation here would be appreciated.
If Eduffield is busy, perhaps another Dash member can help flesh out these posts in more detail before they go live.
Click to expand...
I will answer for the liquidity providers.
We were paid once in October, and continued to do November out of good will really, I think some were not sure when the agreement actually ended.
I choose to have the liquidityprovider=1 in the config, this means mixing happens every block (instead of every 15), the consequence of this is that I get charged 15 times more in denominations for running the hot wallet than normal settings, this makes roughly 1.5 Dash per month.

Coupled with the operating costs of around $0.75 per day, this is a break even point (less with hardware costs) but that doesn't matter because it is necessary atm and mixing would be slower otherwise.
We do this to help the network and as far as I know this is a short term workaround until Evolution comes online..
 
i would like to see the full commands for each of the proposals. Since im not on dashwhale im clueless how to obtain these commands.

thx.
 
fuzzyduck said:
i would like to see the full commands for each of the proposals. Since im not on dashwhale im clueless how to obtain these commands.

thx.
Click to expand...

http://178.254.18.153/~pub/Dash/masternode_payments_stats.html

This page is refreshed every 5 minutes and automatically adds new proposals. No membership needed. No JavaScript used. No IPs send to the NSA. Free as in "Free Beer".

Why work when a script does it for free :)

smilie_drink2.gif
 
bertlebbert said:
And as I mentioned in prior post, OP lists 3rd item as Bitcoin Wednesday for 667.31 Dash, but no proposal has been submitted for this.

Is that simply listed in OP in error? Or is it to be a December budget proposal? If so, maybe just a brief, general description of what it is for.
Click to expand...

I've removed it, It wasn't suppose to be there.
 
reezjue said:
I agree 100% his opinion. What i see is the budget is overspent to something we dont really know where it goes....it should consult with community for every spend that have made and check the result to see is it worth or not.

If we really want to go big...we need to convince outside world about dash...but before that we need to convince our community that we are on the right track.
Click to expand...

I understand you and it would be nice, but unfortunately in real life you can't spend money to promotion in this manner.

Promotion is always a set of experiments (usually unsuccessful tests, but nevertheless inevitably required experiments) where you can estimate results (not always, skills are required!) only after you actually spent the money.

So there always will be massive uneffective spendings for promotion - it is normal and inevitable.
But... if we have professionals in the team - corresponding knowledge and experience will be accumulated (and it is better not to publish key info-results to not allow our competitors to get such a strategic information for free) - and our promotional spendings and efforts will become more effective with each next month.
 
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BolehVPN said:
I am unhappy with the way this month's proposals were made for a few reasons. You can already see from the previous posts that some doubt and uncertainty is creeping in and I hope this is nipped in the bud.
Click to expand...
I disagree. The initial proposal had vague descriptions. Public awareness for example has nothing specific for expenses or activities. I posted comments about this already. It may be that public awareness is difficult to publicize activities in advance due to competition.

This latest set of proposals are descriptive and call out exactly what the funds will be used for. I prefer this. I don't mind at all that the verbiage is truncated.

As for the liquidity provider proposal, we are also learning how to make mixing faster. Not only are there mixing wallets online but many of the team are doing tests and graphing performance of mixing to find where the weaknesses are. The next release will enable faster mixing because of these tests.

Evan, thanks for getting the proposals up. I was looking forward to submitting an Anti-Troll budget for the unused funds this round with Troll Email Bombs and Troll Fines on the bitcointalk thread. But, I think the proposals above are much better. :smile:
 
eduffield : Evan, could we please get some more feedback on what the promo budget is being used for? As has been pointed out, i think about 20k will have been disbursed by the time the December budget is paid and most of us have no idea where that money has been spent (or if it has been spent).

I think some direct feedback on this would be really helpful.

Thanks,
Pablo.
 
Please don't misunderstand. I have nothing against the liquidity providers and am sure they are not doing this to profit.

And I'm totally cool with them being reimbursed. Just that I hope this isn't going to be an ongoing thing too far into the future.

As for the details vs vagueness of the proposals, I understand that there is a balance between protecting from the competition and also giving enough details to the voters. However this can be dealt with simply.

For expenditures that the Dash devs want to push ahead first in the interest of expediency, go ahead and do that without a proposal (for example dash.org) but there will be no guarantee that it will be reimbursed.

For stuff that can be proposed first for a vote, this should be laid out in some detail but if it is unable to do so, then when it is utilized, a report should be given shortly after. However for the IaBITCconf Video I don't see how this couldn't be fleshed out just a little more. We don't need a play by play breakdown but for example I think "Exciting video to be made" "This video will be of Evan talking at the conference and using money to promote it later" is arguably too vague.

Dash is not owned just by the Devs or the Dash team. The whole point of the voting system was for self governance beyond just the devs. The Dash team still has immense power in making very influential proposals.

So if spending wants to be done without being put to the vote first, that's fine, but the team has to take the risk that it may or may not be reimbursed from the blockchain.

Otherwise, if you want to have it proposed and voted on, then you need to flesh out a bit more details and give progress reports.

Mind you, I still think Dash Team is working with good intentions and spending is with good intentions. But let's be a bit more transparent. If everything is 'too top secret' for the rest of us to vote on, then go ahead, but then it may not necessarily be funded. My only concern is that Dash Team controls too many masternodes on their own and can push through any proposal. This I hope isn't the case.
 
BolehVPN said:
Dash is not owned just by the Devs or the Dash team. The whole point of the voting system was for self governance beyond just the devs. The Dash team still has immense power in making very influential proposals.
Click to expand...

It's a little bit off topic, but if BolehVPN can make a proposal and organize common promotional campaign "Dash+BolehVPN", targeting it to people who are looking for anonymity - it would be great!
1. You know this audience very well (and this audience is several times bigger than traditional cryptocurrency's community).
2. There is no need to describe for those people why anonymity does matter.
3. Private payments is an important part of the whole process...
4. ...

If you can make and release such a proposal in fair manner - I am sure it will be supported...
 
The last video was pretty damn good, the script was great and the animations were really good (especially for the money). I know I always go on about this, but I really think we should save up and get it done by some world class animators. I put a few names forward before and it turns one of the guys I suggested just released a video for another project unfortunately (and its fantastic);


These types of videos are twice as much as what we have paid before, but I think they would last the test of time.
 
BolehVPN said:
For stuff that can be proposed first for a vote, this should be laid out in some detail but if it is unable to do so, then when it is utilized, a report should be given shortly after. However for the IaBITCconf Video I don't see how this couldn't be fleshed out just a little more. We don't need a play by play breakdown but for example I think "Exciting video to be made" "This video will be of Evan talking at the conference and using money to promote it later" is arguably too vague..
Click to expand...

Well said. There is also an overlap with this video/dash.org proposals and the publicity budget. We should have more details on the publicity budget and how these funds are being spent. Personally, I trust what is getting done and don't want to bog down the team now with nit picky details. I would rather that they focus on the conference and upcoming whitepapers.

In the future, I see the numbers for these budgets will be much higher. Proposals will probably require 2 page papers to compete with other submitted proposals.

I do have confidence the system is working. The Christmas lottery looks like it won't pass. This shows that masternodes are voting for the future development vs a single payout.
 
BolehVPN said:
is it cause they control a huge chunk of masternodes and are therefore confident that they would be reimbursed.
Click to expand...

This is a valid point. It takes a tiny percentage of upvotes to approve a budget item at this point. It's very possible for a small group of people to completely control this. Downvotes have no impact on that threshold. It's basically a "pass everything and leave it completely open-ended unless there is a wildly overwhelming opposition threshold which can't be reached based simply on abstaining volume alone, so; pass everything money hose without ASICs."

Don't get mad. It's the truth. Whether we believe the matter to be benevolent, or not, is irrelevant. The blockchain currently resembles a wide-open fire hose with no one manning the nozzle....

We had a protracted discussion about pork barrel system. The current implementation of the budget system is actually worse than all of the bad scenarios there imagined put together...

I presumed, at the time, that the system would be evolved. It hasn't been. Perhaps waiting on iteration of Evolution, as the previously chosen word would suggest... Not sure. But this is a huge, glaring, amazing defect... I took it from the "get the piece of clay, then sculpt it" perspective... But the potential for mismanagement is huge to the point of unavoidable, and not potential at all now... The system currently seems to require mismanagement... And no sculpting has occurred.

BolehVPN said:
I hope this is a short term interim thing rather than throwing money at a problem for short term functionality. An ETA on a solution for this or some updates on the situation here would be appreciated.
Click to expand...

Again, we're suffering from poor communication. It was stated that the LP proposal was precisely a short-term band-aid for a problem that Evolution is slated to completely eliminate. But, nobody knows.

I even pretend to be an LP by constantly re-mixing my Duffs with no compensation... Because I'm such a selfish asshole.

Perhaps the solution is to downvote proposals until they are adequately communicated, displayed, put somewhere that we can be aware of it, clearly, anything... Beuller? Beuller?

My understanding is that this is coming... But the protracted difference between now and "coming soon," combined with that echoing motif of really crappy communication, is eroding trust significantly.

Gentoo has a cool news system built directly into emerge (it's package handler). No GUI BS. Right in the console, where all the headless Masternodes dwell... Adopting a similar announcement system would keep us up to date. It keeps people aware of what's going on without them having to dig through forums for information that may or may not even be there...
 
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Solarminer said:
The Christmas lottery looks like it won't pass.
Click to expand...
I searched the forum for "christmas lottery" and this is the only post that comes back as a result.

This being the post that made me aware of it, unable to find any mention of it anywhere else, it includes no information on voting for or against it, I have no choice but to abstain.
 
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