Governance Proposal Deposit Auto-Throttler

NOTE: There is another post for dealing with governance spam but most of the suggestions were about setting fixed initial-deposit and total-deposit (minimum) amounts. This is an incompatible proposal to use an auto-throttling mechanism. We already have a self-adjusting inflation rate to target a 2/3 bonding ratio. Using a similar but different algorithm, we can self-adjust the total-deposit (between reasonable minimum and maximum bounds, just like the inflation rate) amount to target something we want. This proposal is targeting for there to be (on average amortized) N proposals during the governance voting period. N should be low, either 1 or 2, because having too many active proposals at a time can be confusing. Also, we should really take into consideration a rest period after debate, so even if we want 2 maybe 1 is a better choice. The lower the number, the more attention stakers can pay attention to proposals, and allows for the hub governance to focus on top-level issues, and for sub-entities (like a grant program DAO) to focus on encapsulated issues. This doesn’t preclude the activation of more than N (e.g. 3, 4) proposals at a time during the governance voting…

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What about if we make it more simple and say fix to 1 proposal every month, queue up a line, and to skip the line auction the deposit amount?

Don’t we want to prevent spam in the line too, for discovery’s sake?
One problem might be that a time-period-fixed-N-auction-throttle isn’t responsive to emergency issues.

I feel this very limitative, and for software upgrades for example isn’t doable. Let alone with ICS now coming etc we expect to see more proposals.

I like this suggestion from jaekwon.

I think we should make a distinction between pure spam proposals like we recently had a problem with and the general usefulness of limiting proposals.

For pure spam, I think a solution like I proposed in the other thread for filtering the proposal list to remove props with >90% NWV is sufficient. The obvious spam reaches 90% very quickly and then is off the list. If somehow a legitimate proposal is NWV’ed to 90%, it still exists and is viewable on a direct link so it has a chance to come back. This solution has already been put in place by Mintscan and seems to have dealt successfully with the obvious spam.

Personally, I think it would be useful to design separate solutions for pure spam vs general improvements.

That being said, the proposal here is interesting. But does it create some kind of first mover advantage where proposers are incentivized to get proposals in quickly in a given time period?

jaekwon: we should probably adjust the rate every time a proposal becomes activated, so as to prevent cheap spam attacks from happening at any time (a security concern if it were to happen at all, without sufficient cost). Well, the total-deposit amount should self-adjust with both time AND activation of proposal, so that if there are no proposals for a long time, the price becomes cheap again. Hi @jaekwon thanks for sharing these ideas as a potential solution to the proposals spam problem. I think two very different things are spam proposals in the deposit period with little to no financial loss for the malicious actors versus what happened recently in the Cosmos Hub with three spam proposals in the voting period meaning the malicious actors don’t care about losing a large amount of funds. We see a risk in your proposed solution, because legit proposals may know they would not be vetoed but still may feel risky putting a very high deposit, in contrast malicious actors even though they know their deposit would be burnt they may still do it as happened recently in the Cosmos Hub. Let’s assume the worst case scenario in your proposed solution, a malicious actor with a…

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Increasing the governance voting period may also have drawbacks, such as delaying decision-making and making it more difficult to respond to emerging issues in a timely manner.

Other than that, I agree with the concept.

Is it possible to implement a system where the initial deposit is set at 50%, and governance proposals are limited within a single window by gradually increasing fees?

For example:

• First proposal requires a deposit of 100 ATOM
• Second proposal requires a deposit of 200 ATOM (100*2)
• Third proposal requires a deposit of 400 ATOM (200*2)

Additionally, could we implement an auto-adjustment for the deposit fee based on the USD value? For instance, setting the deposit fee at 5000 USD, and having it automatically adjust the required amount of ATOM.

I am not sure if this is technically feasible, but it would be worth exploring.

Hey man, I made a very simple description of a solution that is similar to yours but different in some meaningful ways, care to have a look? twitter.com Jacob Gadikian @gadikian 🚛SMASH GOV PROP SPAM WITH TRUCK!🚒 cc @cosmoshub @osmosiszone @stride_zone @JunoNetwork 1) Validators should be able to submit governance proposals in the current way, without a minimum deposit. 2) Anyone should be able to submit governance proposals for a price that is… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 6:54 PM - 17 Mar 2023 29 3 Basically this doesn’t outsource the whole thing to an algorithm. The hub community remains in control but we all agree that governance proposals made on a permission list basis should cost at least double what the most recent scam proposal cost. My big concern here is about normie’s. I do not want normies to be harmed, and if we look at the recent scam proposals that have actually gone to voting, I assume that they are going to voting because scammers are making money off of the hubs very very few normies. I think that two weeks is long enough to really look at every proposal and I don’t really think…

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Well so that was my immediate thought, it actually would ensure that spammers are incentivized to keep a proposal live consistently.

My preference here would be to keep things as they are, even though it is annoying with the spam.

The alternative is just various forms of censorship with various trade-offs.