We should reduce the cost of proposals.

[UdjinM6]

I get the logic for it sounds sound.

But I disagree with static thinking here. Once 1 DASH is $1,000.00 these 5 DASH would dwarf many proposal's budget. Why not employ some forward-thinking and get ready about various outcomes NOW and not wait for the problem to pop up and say, for example: simply scale the fee to be proportionate, but not prohibitive, to the proposals budgets?

This won't happen overnight so I think we have some time here :wink:
I don't see how proportional fee would work tbh... And patching fee amount once in awhile should solve the "issue" of price jump more or less - we can make fee lower (in DASH) in some new version and old budgets still would be valid (though outdated masternodes will reject new budgets with lower fee but we can drop such MNs off the list by bumping protocol version as usual). Having fee lower (in DASH) in this case shouldn't bring too much troubles (spam wise) because with higher DASH/$ rate 1) spam still would cost a lot 2) MNs should be able to use better hardware i.e should be able to handle more proposals/votes.

 

[fernando]

This won't happen overnight so I think we have some time here :wink:
I don't see how proportional fee would work tbh... And patching fee amount once in awhile should solve the "issue" of price jump more or less - we can make fee lower (in DASH) in some new version and old budgets still would be valid (though outdated masternodes will reject new budgets with lower fee but we can drop such MNs off the list by bumping protocol version as usual). Having fee lower (in DASH) in this case shouldn't bring too much troubles (spam wise) because with higher DASH/$ rate 1) spam still would cost a lot 2) MNs should be able to use better hardware i.e should be able to handle more proposals/votes.

Good to get the opinion of someone who actually knows how things are coded and what can be easily done or not!

In this one I was gonna agree with the ones asking for a reduction because I would prefer more smaller proposals of all types (I, for one, would have made one to get reimbursed for the expenses I had traveling to present to the Internet Freedom Festival, but I decided it didn't make sense to pay 5 dash to MAYBE get back around 30). However, the argument that you can take down masternodes by flooding the system convinced me that 5 dash is ok if it can eventually be changed. I don't think we would have too many proposals, but a cheap attack to take down masternodes is not a vector attack we should not leave open. If there is risk of that, I prefer to have to group the micro proposals.

 

[GreyGhost]

This won't happen overnight so I think we have some time here :wink:
I don't see how proportional fee would work tbh... And patching fee amount once in awhile should solve the "issue" of price jump more or less - we can make fee lower (in DASH) in some new version and old budgets still would be valid (though outdated masternodes will reject new budgets with lower fee but we can drop such MNs off the list by bumping protocol version as usual). Having fee lower (in DASH) in this case shouldn't bring too much troubles (spam wise) because with higher DASH/$ rate 1) spam still would cost a lot 2) MNs should be able to use better hardware i.e should be able to handle more proposals/votes.

So, what you're saying is, instead of bothering with coding every eventuality we just adjust the system as we go? As Fernando just said, it is great to "get the opinion of someone who actually knows how things are coded and what can be easily done or not!"

I'm only not sure how would a cheap attack take down Masternodes? Is this really possible?

 

[fernando]

So, what you're saying is, instead of bothering with coding every eventuality we just adjust the system as we go? As Fernando just said, it is great to "get the opinion of someone who actually knows how things are coded and what can be easily done or not!"

I'm only not sure how would a cheap attack take down Masternodes? Is this really possible?

I'm talking about this previous message he posted:

We decided to go with 5 DASH for reasons and here are few of them.


Not on the technical level :wink:
If the price were too low one can make 1000 proposals literally in minutes via a simple script creating a little chaos there and to remove them we'd have to vote all of them down. But by casting that many votes we'd probably crash some of low-end MNs (current version of DGBB it's not very well optimized memory wise).

If by script submitting+paying for 1000 proposals you can take down a bunch of masternodes and create some havoc, we better make that expensive.

 

[stan.distortion]

1% of total requested makes sense here too, maybe with a lower limit to put some sort of cap on spamming small proposals but I'd like to see a lot more small proposals and the fixed fee makes that difficult, that 5 Dash may be all someone is asking for in return for some artwork or a simple android app but they'd have to ask for double to cover the cost of submission as things are. Maybe returning the fee would be an alternative and in that case the fee could probably be raised quite a lot to avoid spamming. The quadratic voting system someone posted about a few weeks back is coming to mind for proposal submissions for some reason, no idea why yet though, maybe more coffee needed :/

 

[UdjinM6]

1% of total requested makes sense here too, maybe with a lower limit to put some sort of cap on spamming small proposals but I'd like to see a lot more small proposals and the fixed fee makes that difficult, that 5 Dash may be all someone is asking for in return for some artwork or a simple android app but they'd have to ask for double to cover the cost of submission as things are. Maybe returning the fee would be an alternative and in that case the fee could probably be raised quite a lot to avoid spamming. The quadratic voting system someone posted about a few weeks back is coming to mind for proposal submissions for some reason, no idea why yet though, maybe more coffee needed :/

As I said, I don't see how proportional fee could work in this case. Give me some numbers :tongue: Here are mine:
Let's take fernando 's proposal of 30 DASH reimbursement as an example. 1% of 30 DASH would be 0.3 DASH. If 30 DASH was the legit proposal (i.e. it was >= the lowest limit) than what would stop me from submitting 100 of similar proposals for only 100 x 0.3 = 30 DASH fees combined? We have 10-15 proposals now, imagine the list when someone just made this number 10x higher. Smart one would also give them names very similar to legit proposal to further confuse people....
Next let's see how we could vote them out. To bring one proposal down you need at least 10% of network "No"s i.e. ~350 votes. So to remove 100 of spam proposals you would need to broadcast (and store in MNs memory for some time) ~350 x 100 = ~35K votes. But how much is it? Well, all current proposals have only ~22k votes combined.
And that is what can be done for only 30 DASH. Imagine that someone is willing to spend 300 DASH (~$2k at current rate) - 1000 proposal and 350K votes to clean them all.
There is no way our current infrastructure could handle that many votes at a time. So in such extreme situation one possible solution would be to do nothing at all and let there be thousands of meaningless spam proposals instead of trying to fight them. Another one would be to coordinate people and vote spam proposals down one by one. But then, again, it's only 0.3 DASH (~$2) to bring another one online, so it's way to cheap to attack and it's way to expensive to defend (remember to count people's time here too).
Now compare that to 5 DASH (~$35) for a single proposal and 5000 DASH (~$35K) for 1000 proposals. You need to have really strong incentive to throw away that much imo.

 

[IronVape]

What if the cost stayed the same ( or even increesed ) but there were 2 vote thresholds instead of one? First threshold = return of submission fee. Second threshold = proposal approved. SPAM proposals would not even get the fee back.

 

[stan.distortion]

As I said, I don't see how proportional fee could work in this case. Give me some numbers :tongue: Here are mine:
Let's take fernando 's proposal of 30 DASH reimbursement as an example. 1% of 30 DASH would be 0.3 DASH. If 30 DASH was the legit proposal (i.e. it was >= the lowest limit) than what would stop me from submitting 100 of similar proposals for only 100 x 0.3 = 30 DASH fees combined? We have 10-15 proposals now, imagine the list when someone just made this number 10x higher. Smart one would also give them names very similar to legit proposal to further confuse people....
Next let's see how we could vote them out. To bring one proposal down you need at least 10% of network "No"s i.e. ~350 votes. So to remove 100 of spam proposals you would need to broadcast (and store in MNs memory for some time) ~350 x 100 = ~35K votes. But how much is it? Well, all current proposals have only ~22k votes combined.
And that is what can be done for only 30 DASH. Imagine that someone is willing to spend 300 DASH (~$2k at current rate) - 1000 proposal and 350K votes to clean them all.
There is no way our current infrastructure could handle that many votes at a time. So in such extreme situation one possible solution would be to do nothing at all and let there be thousands of meaningless spam proposals instead of trying to fight them. Another one would be to coordinate people and vote spam proposals down one by one. But then, again, it's only 0.3 DASH (~$2) to bring another one online, so it's way to cheap to attack and it's way to expensive to defend (remember to count people's time here too).
Now compare that to 5 DASH (~$35) for a single proposal and 5000 DASH (~$35K) for 1000 proposals. You need to have really strong incentive to throw away that much imo.

True, I've seen it take around 10 minutes for budget.dat to fully sync sometimes, 10x the number of votes and it wouldn't take long for it to be like syncing the full blockchain :/ Can the expired proposal data be flushed out? I thought it was already but the last couple of times I deleted budget.dat it resynced completely, it's nice to have that data but if it could be a cause of bloat...

Sorry, I'm going off track. A fixed fee and adjusting it manually seems clunky is all, certainly good enough for the short term and setting it via the voting mechanism could work long term but those small proposals are niggling at me, I get the impression they could have an awful lot to offer and a fixed fee doesn't give much incentive for them, they could attract a lot of talent but a bar to entry shuts out anyone who's just looking for a few beers in return for something small but significant. Maybe there's better ways of handling that, subdivision of budgets makes sense (development, PR, etc.) and subdividing further could go all the way down to tipbots but how to handle that? Comities? Idk, that sounds wrong but I can't think of anything better and a proven track record of successfully completing proposals could be a way of forming them :/ It sounds like something that would need just a small change to test the waters before further tweaking but I wouldn't be surprised if you pull another rabbit from the hat

EDIT: Just read Evans post on Aprils budget and the part on being able to adjust things like fee per kb through the voting mechanism got a little woot of joy Being able to adjust the proposal fee with that sounds sweet.

 

[TheDashGuy]

I just want the budget platform to be usable for smaller projects as well not just these several hundred-thousand Dash proposals and paying (in todays value) 35+ dollars to simply ask the network a question is a bit ridiculous... What if we're just funding something small like Juan needing paperwork/printables?

 

[Solarminer]

Maybe we need to start a MicroDash voting system. I was thinking you could require proposals that are small, only allow 1 proposal entered per hour, only need a few masternode votes(1%). Maybe this is all power by the MicroDash Masternodes, a division of the Micro-Economoy under the Dash World umbrella.

Ok back to reality. Maybe this is just a multisig wallet that a few willing masternodes approve sending of funds for projects based on a less formal webpage submittal.

 

[UdjinM6]

Maybe we need to start a MicroDash voting system. I was thinking you could require proposals that are small, only allow 1 proposal entered per hour, only need a few masternode votes(1%). Maybe this is all power by the MicroDash Masternodes, a division of the Micro-Economoy under the Dash World umbrella.

Ok back to reality. Maybe this is just a multisig wallet that a few willing masternodes approve sending of funds for projects based on a less formal webpage submittal.

If fee is low enough one can submit small proposals every hour (or once MNs dropped my previous spamming proposal) with script with almost no effort preventing everyone else from entering the queue. Rate limit doesn't really work here imo. It must be expensive to attack.

I don't get the idea of multisig.. You mean there is ongoing proposal like "Fund all the small projects" for say 1000 DASH every month that pays to some multisig address and masternodes should be able to unlock it sending funds somewhere out of it on their will? There are 2 problems: 1) coinbase can't pay to multisig (though we need to fix this sometimes in the future anyway I guess) 2) if it's like N-of-3500 multisig or smth like that it will have HUGE size and will be way too cpu intensive afaik (at least with current crypto, Schnorr sigs could help here I guess but that's only in the future again, probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schnorr_signature https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/r...e-readings/Schnorr-Signatures--An-Overview.md ).

 

[Icebucket]

5 dash is fine, stops the spam and the masternode owners already get dash for "free" so its just 2 weeks or so and you got your 5 dash from one MN. To make your proposal that is going to benefit your holdings, be course that is what we are all looking for. The spam is more about cheating the system and lining the pockets of fraudsters. So I vote to keep the spammers out !

 

[stan.distortion]

Just a couple of thoughts, I've been considering this from a top-down perspective but is there a bottom-up way of looking at it? I was thinking about tip bots, users want to tip someone, that gets turned into votes and votes turned into Dash each superblock... fails at the flooding but it's a different perspective on it. Fwiw, I was thinking through this about 4 years ago as part of an autonomous renewable energy network but those thoughts went in an entirely different direction, part of generated funds go to supporting the network and the contributors send them to whatever projects they want to support, the funds are the votes in effect and if projects don't reach their targets the funds are returned to be sent elsewhere. That was mainly to avoid adding a voting mechanism and allow for localised projects, voting is better for a purely virtual network imho but again, just a different perspective.

 

[Solarminer]

If fee is low enough one can submit small proposals every hour (or once MNs dropped my previous spamming proposal) with script with almost no effort preventing everyone else from entering the queue. Rate limit doesn't really work here imo. It must be expensive to attack.

I don't get the idea of multisig.. You mean there is ongoing proposal like "Fund all the small projects" for say 1000 DASH every month that pays to some multisig address and masternodes should be able to unlock it sending funds somewhere out of it on their will? There are 2 problems: 1) coinbase can't pay to multisig (though we need to fix this sometimes in the future anyway I guess) 2) if it's like N-of-3500 multisig or smth like that it will have HUGE size and will be way too cpu intensive afaik (at least with current crypto, Schnorr sigs could help here I guess but that's only in the future again, probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schnorr_signature https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/r...e-readings/Schnorr-Signatures--An-Overview.md ).

Ok so you took that way farther than I was thinking.....I thought the microdashnetwork would have caused some chuckles.....LOL. I bet it would work on the dish network. Seems to be a lot of talk about that today. :smile:

2nd part. Just fund a small proposal to pay a wallet. Have a few trusted community members(not necessarily masternodes like I said above) to decide activities to send out donations. Maybe use a mutisig wallet so a few people have to agree. Nothing specific to the masternode network or voting system. For small projects, trusting a few people may be the best way.