No With Veto (NWV) removal

11696×204 25.2 KB

In honor of respecting everyone’s valuable time, instead of utilizing it arguing back and forth the merits of what constitutes “minority interests,” why not prioritize completely removing this seemingly abused voting mechanism “NWV” in favor of simplifying voting for all?

We have seen, through on-chain governance, time and time again, and understandably so from their perspective, Validators team up against proposals that go against the grain of their collective personal/political beliefs. We have also seen other members voicing their observation of this behavior sprinkled throughout the forum. Therefore, minimize governance voting to:

Yes | No | Abstain

making voting more equal and fair for all.

Curious to hear your thoughts.

What’s the alternative for fighting scam proposals then?

Great question. Sincerely appreciate your time here, @freak12techno.

Would there be a huge difference in collectively utilizing a “NO,” versus “NWV,” to fight scam proposals?

A) Extraneous Solution:

How operations currently run to rid spam “off-chain” seem to be working, but could be assisted further. To help, in addition to further decentralizing our network, the birth of a new committee/DAO, perhaps funded through AADAO, could assist by being held responsible for maintaining a minimal, threefold mandate:

1. Governance: “NO” towards all spam proposals (limited vote participation)
2. Security: Help maintain the Cosmos Hub’s 2/3 stake ratio via staking
3. Community: Alert via all social channels

What is deemed “spam” must be clearly defined. If any of these mandates are neglected, dissolve the committee and return all funding immediately. In addition to point 2 and 3, a majority % of the rewards earned are immediately sent to the Hub community pool as a non-negotiable.

B) Constitution

@Quentin seems to have reinitiated the Constitution idea, which could lead to a sincere solution, also eliminating the need for “A.”

Yes, but we lose the way to punish the scam proposals creators this way, as just voting NO won’t burn their deposit, right?

Fair point. In that case, why not add the burn consequence unto the “NO” vote?

Would call for higher stakes to those who submit proposals. This way we omit the need for “NWV,” simplify voting and avoid spending resources to modify the deposit minimum altogether.

Burning deposits for proposals that do not pass will severely discourage people from bringing up valid questions to the community. For example, Proposal 69 asked the community if we wanted to include CosmWasm in the Rho upgrade. That’s a valid question, and it was valuable for it to be posed to the community and receive a ‘no’ answer. Similarly, an oversight committee for AADAO was elected via three proposals, one of which was rejected via ‘no’ votes. However, Hub governance currently burns deposits for proposals that fail to reach quorum. I’ve brought this up before (that if voting NWV on spam is done solely to burn their deposit, we could get the same outcome by not voting at all) but folks rightly pointed out that NWV is a strong signal that spam is not welcome on the Hub. It’s a stronger social message than not voting at all. I don’t feel strongly about keeping, abolishing, or further defining NWV. But, I would also ask if NWV actually does get abused. Do proposals get vetoed in a way that people think is counterproductive to healthy governance? AFAIK, ATOM 2.0 is the only proposal to have been vetoed. While some community members do end up arguing about it and judging…

Excerpt (1197 of 1313 characters). Read the whole post on the forum ↗

I also agree with @lexa that I haven’t see any cases other than ATOM 2.0 where a decent proposal was vetoed because people disagree with it, please correct me if I’m wrong. But I think it’s important to distinguish the cases when one just disagrees with the proposal (aka “I do not like the idea behind this proposal”) and when one thinks this proposal harms the ecosystem (aka “I do not think this proposal should have ever been submitted in the first place”). IMO there should be some penalties for people who submit proposals which are not supposed to be subject to governance (two cases I know are 1) scam proposals and 2) stuff like Bostrom chain did, with their promotion of their airdrop - even given that it was legit, this isn’t a subject to a governance and is an attempt to use governance for non-governance reasons). For example, imagine if there’s a validator who wants to get free advertisements and submits a proposal saying how awesome they are, or something similar (this example is an extreme one, but it should show the idea). This is a case where people use governance for totally non-governance reason, and we should punish people who are trying to do things like that. Just…

Excerpt (1199 of 1732 characters). Read the whole post on the forum ↗

Thank you @lexa for sharing your time on this topic, as well as your meaningful contribution helping author Proposal 75 (Defining NWV). lexa: But, I would also ask if NWV actually does get abused. Good question. Not sure, but would love to hear others thoughts on this. Unless I am mistaken, there doesn’t seem to be a place where “irrelevant,” “minority interests,” and other such terminology, are clearly defined, hence supporting the need for some sort of foundational constitution to collectively serve as an agnostic middle ground. Therefore, IMO, this “NWV” feature could easily be “abused.” freak12techno: I also agree with @lexa that I haven’t see any cases other than Valid point. Can agree with you both here. Appreciate your continued discourse @freak12techno , hope all is well. freak12techno: when one thinks this proposal harms the ecosystem This is highly subjective. Wasn’t the Cosmos Hub conceived to serve as a minimal hub? I can be wrong, but doesn’t adding features, such as the NK LSM and CosmWasm, unnecessarily “bloat,” therefore “harm” the system? In addition, proposals such as #848 (ATOM Halving) does not seem…

Excerpt (1197 of 1893 characters). Read the whole post on the forum ↗

FHZ: This is highly subjective. Wasn’t the Cosmos Hub conceived to serve as a minimal hub? I can be wrong, but doesn’t adding features, such as the NK LSM and CosmWasm, unnecessarily “bloat,” therefore “harm” the system? In addition, proposals such as #848 (ATOM Halving) does not seem to have provided any remedy, harming the original purpose of ATOM (governance/staking, not “money”). FHZ: Fair enough, but still seems NWV can be abused if, for example, a group of validators simply dislike certain proposals. My concern here is that IMO the only reasoning to remove NWV voting option is that it might be abused to burn the deposits of some proposers, even if the idea behind it was not harmful. This is indeed possible, but practically, outside of ATOM 2.0 proposal (I think it was vetoed not because it was harmful, but because you need a lower threshold to veto a proposal than to make it fail via NO votes, so in my point of view it was abused here, but I see what you’re saying about it being subjective) I don’t recall any cases when a proposal was vetoed without a valid reason and NWM option was abused. I also can’t recall any cases when a proposal that…

Excerpt (1193 of 1628 characters). Read the whole post on the forum ↗

lexa:

But, I would also ask if NWV actually does get abused. Do proposals get vetoed in a way that people think is counterproductive to healthy governance?

IMG_51431290×2796 233 KB

Prop 952. Ethan being on the FC of the ICF while being CEO of informal, clear COI. Voting Veto is clearly abuse of NWV. (They changed vote later).

So, the answer is yes.

FWIW, we’ve added some months ago a SPAM vote option in the next update of the gov module that will be available from v0.52: cosmos-sdk/docs/architecture/adr-069-gov-improvements.md at main · cosmos/cosmos-sdk · GitHub (note not everything described in that section made it to the actual implementation), but the vote option did.

@freak12techno though I may not fully agree, I can follow your logic. Thank you for continuing to share dialogue on this topic.

Thank you @StunZeed for sharing your time here and showing that NWV can, in fact, be abused.

@julien a SPAM vote feature sounds like a solid solution for the time being. At the very least, this helps evade the potential abuse of the NWV vote. A sincere thank you to you and team.

Actually, replacing NWV vote with the SPAM vote might solve it. Either that, or treating NWV as SPAM and only using it for proposals that are promoting free airdrops or so.
Keeping both doesn’t quite make sense though, as as of now they serve kinda the same purpose and can be used for the same reasons technically (nobody stops anyone from voting SPAM on a proposal they do not personally like, right?)

A SPAM voting option is great, super looking forward to v0.52! I think “protection of minority interests” just isn’t the right way of describing this use of NWV – maybe both the voting option and the spirit of it could be better described as “call for supermajority”. As a protection of minority interests: ‘NoWithVeto’ allows a 1/3+ minority who is against the proposal require a 2/3 ‘Yes’ supermajority (rather than a simple >1/2 majority) to pass a proposal […] I think of the 1/3+ NWV as a sign that such a proposal is important and divisive enough that it warrants a supermajority rather than a simple majority . But when a validator uses NWV on many many proposals, I question whether that validator has a keen sense of which issues are important enough to demand a supermajority. It is more likely that they are behaving in a game-theoretic manner and just trying to get their ‘no’ to count for more, which I think is against the spirit of NWV. One thing we can definitely agree on: Having a voting option that can be both a game-theoretic strategy for failing proposals AND a thoughtful indication of a major issue that warrants a supermajority is confusing and encourages…

Excerpt (1195 of 1801 characters). Read the whole post on the forum ↗

I haven’t see any cases other than ATOM 2.0 where a decent proposal was vetoed because people disagree with it, please correct me if I’m wrong.

Depends on how you view it. If we consider ATOM 2.0 as one of the most political and controversial proposal for ATOM’s, the fact it has suffered abused isn’t nothing. We also witnessed some tentative to abuse NWV more recently with important proposals regarding AADAO. So it seems that, even if it’s not often or all the time, some people do try to abuse when it matters (for them).

In that light I’m supportive of a change. Though I still want scam proposals to be burn !

I like Lexa’s idea with the supremacy vote which seems to be a good middle ground

freak12techno:

Keeping both doesn’t quite make sense though, as as of now they serve kinda the same purpose and can be used for the same reasons technically (nobody stops anyone from voting SPAM on a proposal they do not personally like, right?)

Good point. What stops someone from voting “SPAM,” due to “personal” gripes.

lexa:

Voting options:

• YES
• NO
• ABSTAIN
• SPAM (which burns deposit)
• CALL FOR SUPERMAJORITY

Good idea.

Tagu:

Though I still want scam proposals to be burn !

Agreed.

Question:

Should these “signaling” proposals explicitly exist on the Cosmos Hub forum instead of going on-chain?

The forum offers the “anonymous” voting feature in discussion threads. It could be argued that past on-chain “signaling” proposals were used to “bypass,” in a way, governance to push certain ideas forward.

By requiring signaling proposals to explicitly exist on the Cosmos Hub forum, we are simplifying voting back to:

YES | NO | ABSTAIN | +SPAM

To achieve burning deposits, without the need for the SPAM feature, can we not join the “Call for Supermajority” details into the Y/N vote, or something similar?

No! People could disagree with a prop without wanting them to be punished for an unpopular, misunderstood, unrealistic or incorrect idea.

People can and will still misuse the, “SPAM”, option.

Thank you for joining the conversation @Hush

Fair point.

Though this extends the goal of this direct thread, RE “Signaling” proposals, which were arguably utilized to auto “pass,” certain props, how do you feel if these were explicitly to exist within the forum, instead of on-chain?

All this continues to painfully point to our (subjective) “lack” of foundation, and our ultimate collective need for a working constitution. Perhaps it is time to start modeling ours, the Cosmos Hub, based off the respectful lead of AtomOne.

Not a good idea I think. The forum is explicitly for communication/discussion. Even if there were a consensus I think it would still need to be codified onchain.

sounds like something that wont change anything at this stage

lexa:

ATOM 2.0 is the only proposal to have been vetoed.

That’s just not true. There are hundreds of spam proposals that have been vetoed. There is one even right now #974 with 99.97% voting VETO.

I think NWV should be just changed to SPAM as you proposed. If that was the case, then nobody would have voted SPAM on the ATOM 2.0 proposal because that clearly wasn’t a spam proposal.

Also SPAM threshold should be 50%. Most spam proposals have 99% VETO vote. 33% threshold is just too low for SPAM control. It is either clearly SPAM or not.

And as I have mentioned time and again, the most effective way to deal with spam is increase the deposit. Paying for transactions is a fundamental way to deal with spam from the beginning of time and certainly used widely in blockchains. If a system sees too much spam, increase the cost of submission. The deposit amount for submitting proposals is far too low.

vixcontango:

That’s just not true. There are hundreds of spam proposals that have been vetoed. There is one even right now #974 with 99.97% voting VETO.

I think she was referring to non spam proposals being abused (vetoed while not being a spam)

vixcontango:

I think NWV should be just changed to SPAM as you proposed. If that was the case, then nobody would have voted SPAM on the ATOM 2.0 proposal because that clearly wasn’t a spam proposal.

The argument is that some people are abusing NWV just because they don’t agree with a proposal and want to shut it down. I’m pretty sure the entities that have vetoed Atom 2.0 would have probably also voted “spam” if it was the only choice back then. The same way they would have vote spam in the more recent proposal regarding AADAO. It seems a bit naïve in my mind to think that just because we change NWV to Spam will actually make those entities stop trying to abuse their power vote.

That’s why I am also suggesting to raise the SPAM threshold to 50%.

What happened with the ATOM 2.0 proposal is you ended up with 37% VETO and 47% YES votes. If this was 37% NO and 47% YES, the proposal passes. The low 33% threshold put in play the strategy of Jae’s team to try for VETO despite majority of voting token holders (55% whichi is 47 out of 47+37=84) being for the 2.0 proposal (it was a signaling proposal, not actionable in any case). Jae knew he couldn’t block through the NO vote and that is why he went with VETO strategy. If you put the SPAM threshold at 50%, you eliminate this strategy entirely. Then they have to decide whether to do SPAM or NO and the danger is that if they go SPAM and don’t reach 50%, then the proposal passes which will force them to do an honest NO campaign. Raising the limit to 50% for SPAM therefore turns it into a real differentiator as to whether the proposal is indeed spam and the proposer has to lose his deposit.

We actually had a wild idea for preventing the abuse of the SPAM vote, but we didn’t implement it, as we didn’t get enough feedback of this. From the ADR it is this sentence:

To avoid voters wrongfully voting down a proposal as SPAM , voters will be slashed x % (default 0%) of their voting stake if they voted SPAM on a proposal that wasn’t a spam proposal. The parameter allows to incentivise voters to only vote SPAM on actual spam proposals and not use SPAM as a way to vote No with Veto with a different threshold.

@vixcontango

That’s why I am also suggesting to raise the SPAM threshold to 50%.

Yes, a proposal is marked as SPAM if it is greater than the sum of all other votes (so 50%).

The deposit of a proposal marked as SPAM is always burned (while it is a parameter for NWV).

NWV confiscates the deposit for scam proposals. That’s necessary and useful. I would vote against this proposal for that reason.