Time for Governance?

Community
1

Do we think it’s time to activate governance for our token?

As the token is on the Arbitrum network, we could simply upgrade the contract to enable governance. There are pre-built interfaces to enable the governance interface.

Once enabled all tokens holders could create proposals for other token holders to vote on.

This would drive community engagement, foster ideas and create an avenue for app developers to pitch their ideas for funding. It would also allow the community to decide what gets funding or not, side-stepping any regulatory concerns that the foundation could potentially have.

I’d propose:

  • 10% minimum turnout for a proposal to be deemed valid
  • 10k ANT fee to propose (refund after unless veto’d)

Proposal options:

  • Yes (the proposal passes)

  • No (the proposal fails)

  • Veto (the proposal fails & fee is confiscated)

    EDIT: Added 3rd option by mistake, ignore it and just choose yes or no!
    (please read entire thread before voting)

  • Time for governance? (anonymous)
  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

This would give the owners of ANT a true voice and the ability to take the reins to a future determined by everyone. It would be useful to discern what the majority of holders actually think via polling proposals that wish to question the community on a certain topic.

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2

Good idea, but what does @MaidSafe think about it? Turning ANT into governance token would be a change to the Tokenomics.

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How is governance based on wealth a good idea? For me, that’s the unlevel playing field that were trying to get away from.

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4

its time to close up the contract and toss the keys

how is ownership not renounced yet?

5

I cant speak for Maidsafe as a whole but I can as a individual. I think giving the people the power is a great idea and inline with the ethos of the project. That being said I don’t think we are quite ready for the governance/DAO/DAC step yet, we still have a lot of work to do. As for renouncing the contract I don’t think that is a good idea in case we have to make some changes or adjustments to the whitepaper or the contract for the health of the network. Its too early for that.

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6

Governance based on wealth is not good. No longer a project for the people but for the wealthy

Well it cannot be done. For one it would basically lock out native from easy integration.

Not to mention that adjustments will need to be made to the charging algorithm. I doubt its perfect at the moment, and it hasn’t had a chance to be real world tested since the network is virtually empty for the number of nodes available

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I think any governace is best left to the foundation. People can barely bother to vote every 4 year. Groups/people tend to go full Machiavelli and mainly care about their short term needs/wants or personal/group agendas political or other, not what is best for the project.

I can see no good for a general people governance, maybe a selected few. People tend to think they know economics, in general people tend to be poor at understanding ecoonomics or general logical thinking.

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8

Fully agree.

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9

10k ANT is roughly $700 at the moment, so I’d not call it a wealth for average person, who cares about the project a lot. Most of us probably already have so much ANTs in their bags, and for others it’s not a big deal to get it. Perhaps it could be changed to 5k or 2k, i don’t know. It’s a matter of details. If the power of vote would be dependant on ANT balance, I would call it based on wealth, but @safemedia wasn’t talking about anything like this. Said that, I would be cautious about this direction, right.

More so, that we have this forum, and we have polls here, so why not use that? It’s already here, and if we want the results to be saved permanently, we can always upload the data to Autonomi :slight_smile:

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Yes, but for non-average person, who nevertheless cares about this project, it is too much. Even if it might seem distant, we should think globally in my opinion, and try to give equal lever to average and non-average people. Otherwise the environment is biased towards the average.

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Maybe better said that the more wealthy rather than the wealthy. I am afraid that your response of those with lots care more sounds like the billionaires saying we care the most about economic policy, whereas the major in the world as a whole care the most because it means the difference between living with some comforts and being hungry at times due to not enough money to buy all the food they need at times.

But it boils down to those with more ANT have more control. Those with the many million ANT have huge control. We saw ones with a lot more than just a few million during the exchange process / NFT process.

The 10K fee also means that the ones with less than large bags are excluded due to costs. Even people with 100K ANT are not going to want to give away 10K for each proposal, soon they have none.

No this is definitely an exercise for those who have the most and excludes a lot of others. What about when 1 billion users are out there. The majority will not have even 1000 tokens, maybe 100 for some, and less for the majority. Simple maths tells you that when there is only 1.2 billion tokens

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I like the idea of decentralised governance to play a part in things, even if it’s just non-binding votes to show how tge community feels about certain issues.

Fairness is a massive challenge though. We could get back to the whole ‘proof of unique human’ thing, which doesn’t have any good solution.

Voting based on token holdings is good in that those with skin-in-the-game are voting, but it is also excluding those who can’t afford sufficient tokens.

Maybe a multi-pronged system could work, with different types of voter with different weightings, e.g.

  • token holder votes (maybe with the majority of vote weight coming from time-held and activity, rather than pure balance?)
  • Dev votes, for people who have demonstrably contributed to apps that work on Autonomi
  • Donor votes, for addresses that have contributed funds to support development activity
  • OG votes, for long-term members of the community
  • MaidSafe team member votes
  • Node votes; 1 vote per active node
  • DOXXED supporter votes; for know real people who publicly support the network

Each of these has challenges to try to maximise fairness & prevent gaming, and getting the balance right wouldn’t be easy, and may not be possible in a completely decentralised way.

So, just throwing this out there to spur discussion, but I’d like to see some systems that enable voting in a way that can’t be gamed by the rich or devious… and I don’t know how plausible that is without resorting to centralised checks & balances.

For now, polls on the forum can play a role, and hopefully an equivalent will be made on-network in the future.

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13

Great to see everyone’s comments on this.

I’ll just leave some more of mine here:

I see ANT tokens much like shares in a company. The more shares you acquire, the more votes you have. If you don’t believe in the company you sell those shares.

Having a one-person-one-vote system is great in small tribes or in small countries where you have sovereignty, but unrealistic at this time on a global scale. It just leads to corruption since it would require a central authority. At least with the shares system, it creates a vested interest for the user wanting to make the value of their shares worth more.

As to the concern about early users having a larger voting share as the token was cheaper, I think this might be a good thing as early innovators are the kind of people that would be useful in charting the future direction of the network. Plus the token is cheaper now than a lot of times in its history, so we are still technically in the early innovator stage.

My concern is that once people start uploading copyrighted material onto the network, we are going to be attracting saurons eye (copyright cartels). Their gaze will put a ton of pressure on any central authority they can, be that governments, institutions and the foundation itself. We have already seen the regularity concerns being expressed by the foundation regarding the native token. We can and should preempt this by planning ahead.

So what happens if a large entity buys up the tokens to push their agenda? The minority always has the ability to fork as a last resort. Should the minority disagree with how the majority vote, they can try to convince the majority with new proposals, or simply fork the token and show by example why their vision was better. When forked, you own both tokens (Autonomi, AutonomiClassic etc), and you can even sell the one you think is not the ‘true’ token. There has been proven examples of this in history, and it is the same as open-source repository’s forking.

As to the having polls on the forum… The forum is a centralized place. The polls technically cannot be trusted and could be altered. While I don’t see this as a concern now, in the future when other vested interests become a factor, things could change.

Putting the power into the communities hands at this stage just seems like a wise move to me.

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14

No company here.

As has always been said ANT is like cash. Pay for resource, earn for giving resource.

Once you make it shares in a company then its not about paying for resource but control of others trying to use the company. The analogy is wrought with problems, like maximising profits, and so on when one of the major fundamental goals is a network for all not for profit making.

Honestly this stinks of money clouding people’s minds. Skin in the game is very much a two edged sword and does distort “voting etc” as we saw in IF where there was a degree of voting for making profits, just look at all the comments during voting

The network is not for profit making, if it ever comes to that then it will be its downfall as profit as the goal will bring about rules and design that wrecks the fundamental of the network for all and one all should be able to afford.

I would seek governance another way.

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I agree and there are people with large bags who dont fully understand the tech of the network or long term goals. I would not want them having disproportional voting power due to there bag size.

a woman says computer says no in front of a plant

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Right now all the income (vast majority) for paying for storage goes to the Arbitrum network.

At least with governance in place decisions can be made by the community (let’s say a private native token), and if those decisions made by a majority are seen as ‘maximizing profits’, the minority can simply fork the network and do what they think is best.

The whole point of forks is the ability to move the network in a direction that the forker deems right. It gives the freedom to have your way, and if people believe in it they will follow.

I disagree with you, I think that a core aspect of the network is profit making. The people that put up their computer storage do so to earn the token. This is profit making. The people that buy the token do so because they believe in the idea and think others will also believe in the idea in the future. That is also profit making.

The nice thing about making it a governance token too, is that instead of just buying the token to make profit, you can buy it to have a voice in how the network evolves. An actual share in the network itself.

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Let me correct that

Right now all the income for paying for storage goes to the node operators. The fees are going to the ARB network operators.

That does not change anything and using a profit model for governance (shares thinking) will not achieve good, and will end up generating rules etc that benefit those who have money as their goal.

I suggest seeking governance in another way.

Explains all.

BTW show me which of the fundamentals has that, and which fundamentals you have to remove to get that. Like SAFE and network for all, enabling the poor to participate, and so on. Your governance model only allows the rich to participate in decision making and those decisions will eventually led to the poor not getting the ability to participate. Look at companies, the “shareholders” have to come first with profits etc.

It stinks, and I will say it again it stinks this goals of profiteering off the network at teh expense of those trying to use it.

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This is a difficult one. I have a little experience with another project that I once followed which had similar governance in place.

Some of the counter arguments here are valid as in my experience voting tends to favor financial gain which is often a clouded motivation.

But in the longterm is a small “central authority” like the foundation to rule indefinitely?

Either way I think it is still too early.

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I’m not necessarily looking to join this discussion in general. But I do like to point out that people with a large stake in the network, even without fundamental knowledge, still have the networks best interest at heart. It’s kinda how the whole PoS concept works right? You have a stake in the network, therefor you benefit by it being succesfull. Most people with voting power and no knowledge will probably withold from voting.

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Currently the poor cannot participate as it costs funds to store data. I don’t think forcing node operators to store data for free is good. At least they will have access to free downloads when all the content is stored for everyone to use.

Yes shareholders put profits first. The best path to profits for the network is to spread globally and be the main storage system for the planet. For minorities that disagree with the path taken, they can fork and try their method.

I don’t understand your point about it being at the expense of people trying to use it. The whole network brings free, immutable content to the entire planet. Of course you have to pay the storage operators for storing the content. And if that price gets too high to store, it prevents uptake and allows forks to flourish. So it’s in the token holders interest to keep the storage prices low as the main way the token price will go up is through adoption and interest from people that see this tech as something that will be adopted globally.

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