Let's improve Core/MN and MN/Core communications and relationship and trust.

S

solarguy

Well-known member
Howdy!

We have discovered that trying to have a meaningful and productive relationship between Masternodes and Core over on Discord is challenging to say the least.
We would like to have communication and trust and net productivity get better. Both directions. The world is depending on us to provide honest and efficient money. Actual lives hang in the balance here. We could change the world, and we should change the world. This is really important.

Doesn't that all sound nice? Let's just all play nice together. I think I hear kumbaya in the background.

All kidding aside, how do we accomplish this?

1. There are no silver bullets or quick and easy fixes.

2. The format matters. On Discord, it's extremely easy to miss critical details of a discussion because it has scrolled off the top to never-never land. Great ideas that came up in great discussions 2 weeks ago may as well not exist at all. Effectively, they are gone. That format also seems to encourage polarization, which leads to more and bigger polarization. Then comes shouting and name calling. Not that helpful actually. Using the forum here should reduce those issues to a degree. It's not magic, but it is definitely part of the systemic problem.

3. We can set certain expectations on this forum and particularly in this thread. The goal, the big goal, the really important goal is to offer constructive ideas that are actionable. If it's not constructive, or it's not actionable, it is not helpful. You may as well STFU then. I have no interest in censoring anybody. But if it's not constructive or actionable, you are not helping. If you are not helping, why are you here? That is the entire point of this post.

This in no way prevents vigorous and passionate discussion. Make your point strongly and with enthusiasm. Be respectful. If you attack the person, rather than offer constructive criticism of the idea, I will not ban you (I'm not even a mod here), but I will logically and respectfully cut your comments into little pieces and burn them with fire.

4. There are a lot of ideas for ways forward. I will be asking people to post those ideas here in this post so it is easily accessible forever. Watch this space.
 
Copy Pasta from Ernesto with DCG BizDev:

XK NFT, despite distractions we’ve kept working! This quarter we announced a new exchange with fiat pairs in Costa Rica, the Crypto Gummies,the B2B enabler copper.co (Which is a major one, that sadly got overshadowed by the internal fighting), as well as key account activities with partners, such as a fee waiver that is going on this week with Changenow. In Venezuela we haven’t been very loud recently, because our partners there have been slow to get permissions to boast new integrations… that is why we are getting more licensed partners (that will allow us to make loud announcements), in there we also got another large supermarket, and a casino is coming too! We are working to do a follow up activity with ByBit, but are reviewing budget with them as what they wanted to do is out of reach now. -Usually Q4 and Q1 are slower as there is very little activity from Xmas to mid Jan.- In this moment we have 4 very important pos companies that are integrating Dash, 2 are in S America and 2 are in the US. These are really interesting and large projects as they are first timers, so even though they will take longer, they are really exciting. We also have about 6 exchanges in the short term pipeline, 3 in Brazil, and two in Europe. I expect to have at least 1/3 of these partnerships out in the next 2-3 months. (edited)

Yes, there were setbacks beginning with Arden leaving in December, which impacted our capacity, and plans certainty slowed down; then Omar leaving in January meant I had to allocate a lot of time for interviewing an eventual replacement (Which is on hold for now); and as the discord situations take away a lot of time, I have to dedicate extra time on the platform in order to respond to questions, and clarify facts. Ryan stepping away obviously also created major delays, from administrative tasks such as having to reprogram meetings, and get projects and connections from him, and also check next steps on many tasks as processes such as NDA signatures had to be revised… So the overall capacity of BD was diminished by half when you add up Omar and Ryan, and it had a bigger impact in slowing down the pace of delivery given their seniority. I would lie if I say I have not been disappointed at the way things have turned out, and the unnecessary fighting that has been going on at the DAO; but I see it as the price to pay for working on financial freedom, so even though we kept working, yes there were many distractions in this Q.

We have also been working on a set of activities to improve communication both internally, and outward looking. One of them includes monthly conversations with partners, so we can share more details of what is going on inside our relations, and we have already booked with the first partner to have the fist “Dash Chat” for the first days of January. And I have also been working on a shareable report of our pipeline, that will provide visibility into what we are doing, while keeping confidentiality for business purposes. This is still hip, but it will look something like this with accompanying data and information on potential releases, and will probably be shared every two months:

The granularity of content is still being defined, as I have not had chance to complete all details. But the initial idea was to show the % of projects per vertical, and the stage they are at and a description like the one I shared on the previous paragraph (Suggestions are welcomed)
Image


So no, the BD team and myself are not shying away or losing motivation… I truly believe in the financial freedom we are building and will continue to add more value and work on getting bigger and better integrations. Thank you for just calling me Ernesto
 
Hey, let's get the ball rolling here. We got stuff to do. I am reposting Joel's thoughts (with permission) on some of the structural issues and possible solutions to those issues. We either start talking about the big issues (constructively or stfu) or Dash withers and dies. Those are your two options.


  2. Ok everyone. I wrote this up this afternoon about frustrations on Dash's performance. These are my suggestions for improvements: Dash has an incentive problem, which I believe to be the root cause of everything else. Evan did a great job with the first DAO, but there is some incentive misalignment which I believe has cause a host of problems. False Assumption #1: Masternodes are incentivized by their investment and rewards to make the best possible decisions for the network. False Assumption #2: DFOs are incentivized by their payment and need for masternode votes to deliver the best possible work and results for the network. False Assumption #3: The network can always “fire” the main development team for underperformance. (edited)



  3. [8:56 PM]
    Reality #1.1: Masternodes have little incentive to refrain from spending on bad proposals, since their perceived income remains unchanged regardless of what they fund (in reality, more Dash created costs them, but this is largely an invisible cost). Reality #1.2: Masternodes have little immediate sensitivity to the success of Dash as a project, since speculative price swings largely happen regardless of fundamentals. By the time lacking performance is realize, most are either too invested (sunk cost fallacy) or simply cut their losses and sell. Reality #1.3: Masternodes have little sensitivity to the overall usage of the network since the vast majority of their revenue comes from inflation and not fees (napkin math: for fees to equal a masternode’s current reward, the network would need 8.2 million daily transactions at 1 cent USD per). Reality #2: DFOs have no direct incentive for performance, as their pay is tied to convincing MNOs to vote for them, not to growth metrics (due to MNO incentive issues mentioned above) This incentivizes political successes over revenue generation and user acquisition. Reality #3: With only one major development team, the network is faced with a dilemma to either dissolve the main development team and cause significant harm to the network, or continue to tolerate underperformance. Faced with this dilemma, most MNOs will choose underperformance. (edited)
    [8:57 PM]
    Technical Solution #1: Implement the previously-proposed solution to give unused treasury funds to masternodes and miners (or just masternodes) instead of simply not creating them. This makes the costs of funding treasury proposals more apparent to masternodes, which not only makes them more discerning in which proposals they fund, but also prioritize proposals they believe will bring a return on investment in the form of either higher transaction volumes (and therefore fees) or higher prices from bringing in new investment, or both. Technical Solution #2: ENTIRELY CONTINGENT ON #1 BEING IMPLEMENTED! Increase the maximum treasury to 20% to allow greater capability of funding competing teams so that the network has an alternative to choose from. Instead of the dilemma of funding underperformance vs. funding nothing, this adds the potential for a new team (or several) for each key ecosystem area to compete for market share, increasing the productivity of all teams. Additionally, a larger potential treasury decreases the amount, both absolute and as a percentage, of revenue that masternodes receive. This pushes them to seek ways of compensating for lost revenue, including increasing network fees. Technical Solution #3: Allow the treasury to come out of fees as well as inflation. This not only ensures that critical infrastructure will continue to be funded long after inflation becomes insufficient, but it also encourages DFOs to increase the activity on the Dash network in order to increase the pool of available funds. (edited)
    [8:57 PM]

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    1





  4. Structural Solution #1: Transition most DFOs to an Incubator-style reporting and compensation structure. While this is by no means a perfect solution and does not necessitate changing the mission, funding amount, or organizational structure of any DFO, it does ensure that all work produced is publicly-viewable in real time, the cost for output is clearly shown, and workers are paid for producing output rather than for holding job titles. While this still leaves room for lower quality work, overpaid work, and misallocation of resources, at least this provides radical transparency so MNOs and DFOs are better able to run the DAO, and closes the loophole of being paid to produce no output. Structural Solution #2: DFOs should experiment with supplementing income with revenue from business sources including referral fees from Dash ecosystem partners such as wallets, exchanges, etc. This provides an incentive for DFOs to not only convince the MNOs that they’re doing a good job, but also to acquire real-life paying customers and users in the Dash ecosystem, which not only grows the network directly, but also incentivizes outside companies and services to prioritize Dash if significant portions of their revenue comes from Dash usage on their platforms. Ecosystem Solution: We simply need to build more things on Dash and get orders of magnitude more regular users to grow a sustainable ecosystem through network fees. (edited)
    February 12, 2022
  5. e626492d953c605816bb6dfa476bc567.webp
    @TheDesertLynx
    Ok everyone. I wrote this up this afternoon about frustrations on Dash's performance. These are my suggestions for improvements: Dash has an incentive problem, which I believe to be the root cause of everything else. Evan did a great job with the first DAO, but there is some incentive misalignment which I believe has cause a host of problems. False Assumption #1: Masternodes are incentivized by their investment and rewards to make the best possible decisions for the network. False Assumption #2: DFOs are incentivized by their payment and need for masternode votes to deliver the best possible work and results for the network. False Assumption #3: The network can always “fire” the main development team for underperformance. (edited)












 
The biggest issue imo is communication, not just DCGs communication (which is pretty good these days imo) but the whole communities. Most of it has no idea what's going on in other areas and often aren't even aware of their existence (and wouldn't be interested in following those communities if it means installing a new platform). The only thing that can solve that is some magical platform everyone is happy to use... total fantasy but spreading awareness wherever reasonably possible is a good second place.

Why does this forum get so little use? I prefer forums for most discussions but maybe that's just what old people do these days. Might be worth posting new forum thread notifications on other platforms and see if it gives it a boost.
Edit: The forum has email notifications, can it have notifications to other platforms?
 
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That's the big question. The majority recognize that Discord sucks for having a substantial conversation that we might want to refer back to. It's fine if you happen to be there right at the moment a conversation occurs.

Moving to a different venue is a battle against inertia.
 
One of the pillars of crypto is that it is uncensorable. If we make MNOs pay from their own pocket then they may be more prone to self-censorship e.g. not wanting to break laws regarding sanctions. You can't be a truly decentralized DAO if you're giving preference to certain groups of people based on location. The current model is tough but at least there is at least some separation of voting and money.
 
solarguy said:
Structural Solution #1: Transition most DFOs to an Incubator-style reporting and compensation structure.
Click to expand...

As I admire and love experimenting with new solutions and structures, I don't find Incubator-style structures very effective (and neither transparent, as claimed).
In my opinion, it may serve ok for really small tasks and small teams (1-3 individuals), but won't be efficient for large teams, necessary to deliver complex projects. As already pointed out in the original post, this structure leaves room for lower quality work, overpaid work, and misallocation of resources but I think it is also highly ineffective from the coordination standpoint and would require enormous effort to coordinate medium and large projects.
Problems like integration issues, knowledge silos, ineffective knowledge sharing, high attrition rates, difficulties in coordination, difficulties to develop a comprehensive vision and single direction, next to financial and quality inefficiencies make me very skeptical about this approach.

Mentioned above radical transparency is also not guaranteed IMHO - it all depends on the people who report and what they put into the reports. I think, there is no substantial difference between the "traditional" company model and the Incubator-style approach in the case of reporting.
 
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