Pre-Proposal: Project updates via proposal system

GrandMasterDash

GrandMasterDash

Well-known member
Masternode Owner/Operator
All projects receiving funding must submit at least one project update per cycle via the proposal system.

Criteria for updates:
  1. standardized tag to distinguish them from regular proposals.
  2. must be submitted at least 5 days before the voting deadline.
  3. cost 0.1 dash and must be signed by the private key receiving funds.
  4. no payouts, no refunds.
  5. must contain at least 120 words*
  6. optional; link to image which will appear before main text (stock photography or other).
  7. prompt Proposal Owner to include milestones, due dates and KPIs, but not enforced.
  8. failure to provide at least one update per cycle will automatically and permanently de-fund the proposal.
Benefits:
  1. provides a guaranteed source for project updates.
  2. updates can be automatically extracted for blog posts / newsletters.
  3. keeps on-going proposals fresh in MNO minds.
  4. zero tolerance for no progress reports.
* The minimum word count criteria is based on the concatenated readability of 20 live proposals; 120 x 20 = 2400 words. This number is close to the recommended word count for fintech blogs / articles, which typically expect higher word counts.

Source: https://neilpatel.com/blog/long-blog-articles/

Work to be carried out by owners of the dash protocol (currently DCG) within 6 months of this proposal passing. This proposed work is deliberately simplified and absent of Platform functionality. Technical documentation and a reference HTML/JS form is expected.

Automated blog posts / newsletters are expected to be built by independent community members and NOT by DCG.
 
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I thought of this but I am not sure I agree. If I asked you to write about your thoughts on privacy governance and accountability, could you do it? Could you tell me what motivates you, your hopes and fears? Could you keep a diary of tasks and some of the challenges you faced?

I think for some people it is a little bit of a challenge, and it should be, but not impossible. Imagine if a contractor kept writing the same repeated comment every month because they were not creative enough or energized enough, this would become evident in their submissions and inform MNOs accordingly. There is at least one ongoing proposal in the current cycle that has zero updates but because they are well known / established they seem to get a free ticket.

I thought of adding a text diff algo requirement e.g. must be minimum of 30% text difference from previous cycle, but AFAIK proposal history is not kept on-chain.

I am willing to compromise a little on the word count but not too small because I want MNOs to be exposed to the inner workings of Proposal Owners. Let them copy-and-paste boilerplate responses that we can make a decision from that, instead of going silent and slipping under the radar. It is not enough for a proposal to be on the list, we should encourage regular feedback and constantly in the face of MNOs.
 
I should also add, with this requirement, Proposal Owners would know up front what is expected of them. I think it helps shift the focus away from cheap proposal submissions to something more concrete, actual engagement. In this sense, the proposal fee becomes less relevant and could pave the way to less spam proposals and maybe lower proposal fees.
 
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The MNOs can enforce this if they all agree, POs can pro-actively do this to ensure the security of their funds too. At MNOwatch, we've been working on the site tirelessly these holidays, main updates are to the named clusters (we found a few more). Some experimental work on discovering how Crowdnode votes as well.
 
@xkcd You know I like the work you do, but is there a plan to get more devs involved? It just seems the work you do might be dash's last hope. What you need now is a way to identify large holders among multisigs / masternode shares, and honestly I'm not that hopeful.

As for this pre-proposal, I don't think it's good enough to expect pro-active MNO responses. Perhaps a few here are willing to watch and challenge POs, but most people are not.

This pre-proposal is relatively easy to implement. I imagine just a days work plus testing.
 
I like the idea overall. Probably needs to be worked in some more details.

How is actually in your mind Guys, mnowatch a great tool?
From my perspective it seems more like spying/surveillance tool that scares potential MNOs rather than anything else.
 
kot said:
How is actually in your mind Guys, mnowatch a great tool?
From my perspective it seems more like spying/surveillance tool that scares potential MNOs rather than anything else.
Click to expand...

My personal motivation that keeps my mnowatch.org hobby alive is not to scare potential masternodes, it is to scare potential voters in general. Whether these voters are masternodes, miners or politicians or whoever. Thats why I am planning to spy/surveil and scare the crowdnode voters too. But the voters' terror has not reached the desirable peak, unfortunately mnowatch.org is not capable to scare the voters as much as I would like.

For the terror to reach the peak I would like also the proposals to be judged in the long term. It is pitty that Dashwatch is abandoned. The judgement of the proposals will lead to the final judgement of the voters who supported the relevant proposals. And of course the next step will be the punishment of whoever votes unwisely (this can be proved by the evolution of the proposals he/she supported) by diminishing his/her voting power. Someone may argue that it would be nicer to reward the good voters rather than punish the bad voters. This is a wrong decision, because the bad decisions are countless, while the good decisions are limited. So if you incentivize the good voters and not punish the bad ones then the bad voters, having no immediate cost when deciding unlimited bad decisions, they will sink the ship.

Voters should be judged. The Dash community should escape both from the dark pit of plutocracy and from the dark pit of the mob rule, and approach the light of meritocracy.

Accountability now!
 
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kot said:
How is actually in your mind Guys, mnowatch a great tool?
From my perspective it seems more like spying/surveillance tool that scares potential MNOs rather than anything else.
Click to expand...

I don't think people should be scared of it, but they have the option to hide from it if they are very careful. It does show the power of analysis of blockchains and while the governments and chainalysis companies won't share with us what they know, we do. You can bet they have a far better MNOwatch than we do, so the data collection abilities of MNOwatch must be considered the bare minimum.
 
kot said:
I like the idea overall. Probably needs to be worked in some more details.

How is actually in your mind Guys, mnowatch a great tool?
From my perspective it seems more like spying/surveillance tool that scares potential MNOs rather than anything else.
Click to expand...

Go ahead, let's refine this, what shall we change? Should we bring the word count down to, say, 200? Any other criteria?

As for mnowatch / governance, I just want to see some leveling of the playing field. Over the years I've observed the emergence of humpbacks without any action being taken to prevent this centralization.

Back in the day, when DCG jumped in bed with Chainalysis, that pissed me off because it was like one rule for them and another for us. I mean, that same tech might of been useful to dash users, by providing an in wallet score of their coins / anonymity. But it wasn't, it was more like a one-way street, leveraging information against dash users. Yes, that information might of scared off some users, which in turn might of driven dash more down the privacy path.

Now, I think more than ever, to retain the current governance model, we need more eyes on humpbacks. Alternatively, and I think probably for the best, dash should switch to governance tokens. Of course, centralization could still occur, but I think we can design to prevent it.
 
kot said:
For what reason and purpose?
Click to expand...

While the middle class of masternodes and the sardines clearly support Dash, the Humpbacks are suspects of being either the strongest supporters of Dash or its worst enemies (government agents, rival cryptos etc).
 
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kot said:
For what reason and purpose?
Click to expand...

To make public and verifiable proof of voting abuse / collusion. This will be even more important when filters are applied to Platform. Who will govern and audit these filters?
 
What is voting abuse (I might've not enough background to get the idea)?
Is this not too far? To me it looks rather like a chance given for trolls and maniacs to chase after the other individuals and publicly "shame" them if someone dares to vote different way than expected.
 
kot said:
What is voting abuse (I might've not enough background to get the idea)?
Is this not too far? To me it looks rather like a chance given for trolls and maniacs to chase after the other individuals and publicly "shame" them if someone dares to vote different way than expected.
Click to expand...

Sybil resistance, whether it is proposal voting, quorum formation or content filtering on Platform. The original concept of collateral was to thwart Sybil attacks i.e. the assumption that mass accumulation of dash by a single entity (or cabal) would send the dash price sky high / impossible. I believe this thesis has been proved wrong, that there has been long term accumulation by a just a few entities / structuring, thus raising the possibility of collusion.

If you want whales and humpbacks to have the best privacy regarding voting then I say yes, but I will also expect the same for end users, else they too will be subject to the same discrimination.

Your question in my previous proposal was good, asking me why I should hold DCG board members to a different standard. If dash had excellent Sybil resistance and if the proposal system did not allow a majority payout to a single propsal, then I would agree, but I believe this is not the case. Collateral worked in the beginning but it is showing signs of failure. It may already be too late.
 
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Pre-Proposal updated.

I have drastically cut the minimum word count to 120. This was calculated based on the readability of 20 active proposals concatenated into one automated blog post / article.

Source: https://neilpatel.com/blog/long-blog-articles/

The Proposal Owner may also include a link to an image that would appear before the main text. If an image is missing, an automated system might use a standard placeholder or an image chosen by an AI (Stable Diffusion etc).
 
If changes are to be made, I would add the following to the proposal:
1. For projects
- define milestones
- add due dates to the milestones
2. For services
- define KPIs (and report them)
 
@kot I have updated the proposal to prompt Proposal Owners for this info, but I do not want to enforce it in the initial release. We could probably review this after, say, 6 months, at which point we could engage with MNOs and POs for feedback.
 
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