Pre-Proposal: Solving the 'Free Money' treasury problem

[vazaki3]

I never vote to polls that do not offer "other" as a poll option.

What "other" could be? A dividend to all the dash community members, for example. Or any other alternative someone else could think.

It is pathetic when the designer of the poll tries to trap the voters and lead them to specific paths. If you design a poll, always give "other" as a poll option, in case of course you want to play fair and not to mislead the voters.

 

[forro]

I never vote to polls that do not offer "other" as a poll option.

What "other" could be? A dividend to all the dash community members, for example. Or any other alternative someone else could think.

It is pathetic when the designer of the poll tries to trap the voters and lead them to specific paths. If you design a poll, always give "other" as a poll option, in case of course you want to play fair and not to mislead the voters.

vazaki3, I understand your desire for an 'other' option.

However, my goal here is focused on creating a sense of ownership over the treasury funds. Currently it is viewed as free money and is handed out freely to ineffective POs. If the masternodes feel like it is coming out if their own pocket, they will be less easy with it, and they will expect more out of the POs. POs will know they will face more no votes if they aren't more transparent and more responsive to community questions and concerns. They will know that they will need to do a better job of showing that they are worth the money they get.

If the MNOs feel ownership over the funds, perhaps more of them will start to vote, more will join discussions, bringing more ideas to the community. Perhaps MNOs decide more proposals should be handled through the dif, where equity and more accountability could be obtained.

The end result will be proposals and proposal owners who will do a better job of adding value to the dash. It will help stop the slide and even bring us back up.

As a side effect, the ROI of a masternode would increase slightly, so the MN count would increase proportionally.

Once the 'free money' problem is solved, I would certainly be open to other ideas.

 

[Geert]

https://ethics.theamericancollege.edu/library/news/everyday-ethics-–-what-if-everybody-did

Forro,

What if every shadowy anon created a decision proposal to change our reward structure? Would that be a good thing? IMHO we need to wait a bit and see what DCG thinks is the best course of action after the failure of both the DCG and MNO proposals. The failure may have been due to the extreme stress most people are under at this time. Maybe they can pass a slightly modified version of the DCG plan (15% max?) after the world calms down.

 

[stan.distortion]

https://ethics.theamericancollege.edu/library/news/everyday-ethics-–-what-if-everybody-did

Forro,

What if every shadowy anon created a decision proposal to change our reward structure? Would that be a good thing? IMHO we need to wait a bit and see what DCG thinks is the best course of action after the failure of both the DCG and MNO proposals. The failure may have been due to the extreme stress most people are under at this time. Maybe they can pass a slightly modified version of the DCG plan (15% max?) after the world calms down.

"Slightly modified" isn't going to cut it, if a major change to the fundamentals of our governance doesn't have overwhelming support then it's not suitable for implementation. Remember when Ryan proposed the DIF should burn funds to pass gains onto all Dash users? That was a no-brainer imo, genius plan but it fell flat on its face. The ideal in some eyes can be total garbage in others, we need to pass any major change by as many Dash users as possible before putting it to a vote otherwise we risk pissing off a large percentage of them.

Something to bare in mind with the quality of proposals, when there where usually funds left over it wasn't a competitive environment, lots of junk made it through. It's a competitive environment now but that's only a relatively recent thing, it's still a long way form establishing norms. That means some plans can be worked out based on how things are working but it should still be done with caution, if left alone it could be working a whole lot differently in the future to the way it's working today.

I'm not saying changes shouldn't be made, just that our hindsight isn't necessarily 20/20 yet.

 

[Geert]

Remember when Ryan proposed the DIF should burn funds to pass gains onto all Dash users? That was a no-brainer imo, genius plan but it fell flat on its face.

What are you talking about? There was no vote on burning Dash. The DIF right now has the option and can conceivably burn Dash if a majority of the supervisors decided it was the right thing to do. Buying and burning Dash is the only legal way the DIF can return value directly back to MNOs. People did not understand that this option would only be used if the DIF had more non-Dash funds than it could use. I would guess that amount is north of 100 million dollars.

 

[forro]

Folks, the treasury's 'free money' problem will not go away. Only when we make the necessary adjustment from 'free money' to 'my money' will spending get smarter. Look at nearly any government in the world, where the answer is to 'throw money at the problem'. Extremely large amounts of money are stupidly thrown at various problems with little success. Unless there is more scrutiny, brought about by a sense of ownership, will the spending be smarter.

If we assign leftover funds to masternodes or to a split of both masternodes and miners, smart spending will be incentivized. More questions will be asked, more answers will be demanded, and proposal owners will have to be more open and transparent about their proposals, activities, and results. There is no other way.

If you are active on other platforms, please do what you can to raise awareness on this issue.

 

[stan.distortion]

Folks, the treasury's 'free money' problem will not go away. Only when we make the necessary adjustment from 'free money' to 'my money' will spending get smarter. Look at nearly any government in the world, where the answer is to 'throw money at the problem'. Extremely large amounts of money are stupidly thrown at various problems with little success. Unless there is more scrutiny, brought about by a sense of ownership, will the spending be smarter.

If we assign leftover funds to masternodes or to a split of both masternodes and miners, smart spending will be incentivized. More questions will be asked, more answers will be demanded, and proposal owners will have to be more open and transparent about their proposals, activities, and results. There is no other way.

If you are active on other platforms, please do what you can to raise awareness on this issue.

Government spending is a great example. Look at the recent Pfizer vaccine approval, the UK minister who set the precedent for approving it has £600,000 worth of shares in Pfizer that went up considerably in value after his decision. That kind of thing happens all the time with government funding, decisions effecting personal gain. Is that the direction our governance should take?

 

[forro]

Folks, when the MNOs feel the money coming out of their own pocket, they will expect more transparency and responsiveness from proposal owners. Until that happens, you can expect the same poor results that Dash has experienced.

 

[Geert]

We had the chance to pass the DCG proposal, but the MNOs did not bite.

The DIF can help mitigate the free money problem if we insist that entrepreneurs seek funding from the DIF instead of the treasury. As we have seen with Kuvacash and DashRetail, direct treasury funding of for-profit enterprises does not work. The "entrepreneurs" are liable to spend all their time schmoozing the DAO instead of releasing actual products and services.

 

[xkcd]

We had the chance to pass the DCG proposal, but the MNOs did not bite.

it was garbage, they wanted to up the treasury to 20% and only have 60% of that come from MNs! Pfft!
The MNO proposal was less objectionable with 100% coming from the MNs.

 

[Geert]

We are not even spending the 10% budget for a while now and you're concerned we will suddenly spend 20%, even if it's mostly coming out of our pockets? Pfft back to you!

 

[stan.distortion]

it was garbage, they wanted to up the treasury to 20% and only have 60% of that come from MNs! Pfft!
The MNO proposal was less objectionable with 100% coming from the MNs.

Upping it to 100% of MN rewards would be fine, allowing MNs to get the 10% if they downvote everything is the problem.

I can't see any reason why miners should be included in it, they do one job, MNs do another. The only sense I can see there is miners lobbying MNs, gets more discussion going over proposals I guess but it's not a good incentive imo.

 

[Geert]

Stan, unfortunately IMHO you never understood the DCG plan -- why it was structured the way it was. You wrote it off without understanding it.

 

[forro]

It is worth repeating: MNOs own a lot of dash. They care about their investment. They are not so stupid or greedy that they would vote down every proposal. Granting leftover funds to them at the end of each cycle would bring many benefits:

It would create a sense of ownership of the treasury funds. Rather then being seen as 'free money' and thus spent unwisely, MNOs would see the money as 'coming out of their pocket', and would begin to spend it more wisely.

As a result, they would be incentivized to vote 'no' more often. Proposal owners would have to step up their game, be more responsive, transparent, and accountable to the MNOs to bring better proposals and better results.

As a result, the entire treasury system becomes more effective.

The small monthly 'bonus' will slightly increase the ROI of holding a masternode, and so the masternode count will also increase slightly, increasing the scalability of the network. The additional dash locked up in the new masternodes will increase scarcity of each dash, so price will increase as well. All holders of dash will benefit.

MNO voter participation will increase as well, as we are directly incentivizing participation. Some MNOs may choose to vote no on everything, but as stated above, MNOs own a lot of dash. They care about their investment. They are not so stupid or greedy that they would vote down every proposal. They want good results. They want Dash to succeed.

It was very encouraging to hear Ryan Taylor comment on this during the 2020q4 presentation. I hope we can soon see a DCG proposal to this effect.


It is worth reiterating that if all leftover funds go to MNOs rather than a split with miners, the effect will be more direct, and thus more effective.

 

[Geert]

"It's worth repeating..."
"It's worth reiterating..."

With apologies to Hillary Clinton: We debated. We voted. They died.

Frankly, I don't know what you hope to accomplish. We are in this situation because people decided to oppose DCG for the sake of opposing DCG rather than accept defeat of the MNO proposal. RT's plan was a good compromise. Now we all have to live with the consequences of their selfish act.

 

[stan.distortion]

Imho you're in denial over the real reason both those proposals failed. Take a look at the results, neither had strong support in either round of voting. Call that butthurt over the MNO proposal being rejected if you like but it seems obvious to me some aspect of both proposals was disliked and the main aspect they both shared was changing who the 10% of generated funds belongs to.
How about we change the 18 million cap, if that was rejected who'd be to blame? That 10% isn't a whole lot different, it's never belonged to anyone, the only way to get any of it is getting a proposal approved. Come up with something truly inspired and that might change, it might even be acceptable to change the cap limit if it was a obvious step forward, a real no-brainer but it needs to be something really, really good, no room for doubt.

 

[Geert]

Imho you're in denial over the real reason both those proposals failed. Take a look at the results, neither had strong support in either round of voting.

plan yes no abstain
-------------------------------------
DCG 636 435 23
MNO 406 625 40

The results of the first vote demonstrates that the DCG plan would have passed if MNO proponents had accepted defeat and supported the other plan.

 

[stan.distortion]

plan yes no abstain
-------------------------------------
DCG 636 435 23
MNO 406 625 40

The results of the first vote demonstrates that the DCG plan would have passed if MNO proponents had accepted defeat and supported the other plan.

Those figures speak for themselves, "for" and "against" are fairly close to equal. If the common points in those proposals had even reasonable support then both proposals would've had more "for" than "against".

Maybe have a look at the voting history. Those figures suggest most voting was "yes, no" or "no, yes" but I'm fairly sure you'll find that's not the case, that most of the votes where "yes, yes" and "no, no" with a smaller amount "for" one and "against" the other.

 

[Geert]

The whole point of the simultaneous proposals was to PICK ONE OPTION over the other, and so we can assume that the vast majority of MNOs did not vote for both. The for and against for the proposals basically mirror each other which is another indication that people voted FOR the one they liked and against the one they didn't overwhelmingly.

There were 406 votes FOR the MNO plan. And we can see that those 406 constitute the vast majority of the NO votes (435) for the DCG plan. IF those 406 votes were flipped to the DCG plan that would have been over 1000 yes votes for DCG plan in the subsequent proposal.

 

[xkcd]

For those of you worried about increased NO votes under the plan where the DAO is wholly funded from the MNs reward, consider this. If a proposal came to us from Grayscale for a listing (trust) called GDASH on the NYSE as a instituitional onramp and they mentioned they already have a million dollars ready to pour into the fund from eager beaver fat cat wall st. investors and the proposal asks for 8,000 DASH to set it up, cover legal costs, admin and so. There is NOT A SINGLE MNO that would vote against that. Not one!

There reason you guys are concerned about the No votes is because you know damn well there are a metric tonne of low value proposals in the system now that would not get the passing grade and God damn me, nor should they !!!