[DISCUSSION] Working draft of Cosmos Hub Charter

this charter currently lives on GitHub : PR’s welcome The Charter is a document which should be collectively defined by the citizens of the Hub. It is voted on and enforced by all of us. One of its core functions is to ensure that core teams are kept accountable to the wider citizenry. As such, it is not for us, the authors of the paper, to determine what should or shouldn’t go into it. The best we can do is to humbly offer suggestions and recommendations, and in doing so help frame the space of possibilities. In light of this, none of what is written below should be considered final. This is a rough and incomplete draft that aims to clear up some of the confusion we’ve seen since the paper was announced. One that we hope may serve as a continuation point for further debate and synthesis. We have deliberately left in-line commentary (in quote blocks like this) to provide further context or to highlight certain areas that require further debate. Since this Charter is contingent on approval of the whitepaper, the Charter can only be voted on after the whitepaper has been ratified by ATOM stakers. We expect to see many iterations of this Charter between now and then.…

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sacha:

Article 39
A council can vote to remove any of its council members with a two-thirds majority vote. The Assembly and ATOM stakers cannot remove a council member directly.

So far, this is one of the main points of contention I have noticed in Telegram.

In an ideal world, councils will police themselves and the community won’t need to get involved as far as individual members go. I also realize we can remove entire councils.

This doesn’t seem consistent to me, though. If we can vote in individual members, why can’t we (the community) vote them out? It would have to be a big issue to even get to this point, but I don’t know if I like totally ruling out the ability, if needed.

I personally would not advocate for creating that type of governance culture, as it is especially prone to witch-hunts. Here’s a list of reasons why I don’t see the purpose of individual removal proposals: • Councils are incentivized to remove council members rather than having all of their powers revoked. If they fail to remove bad actors, that should be indicative of their inability to perform their duties effectively. Thus, removing individuals is redundant if the removal of bad actors is part of the councils’ governance mandate (and it should be). • The wider community lacks the same context that other council members within that environment would have to assess if the removal is just. • Raising a public signaling proposal to remove a single individual within an organization is presuming guilt before a trial, and it will be permanently damaging to that individual’s reputation (regardless of whether they’ve committed a wrong-doing). A counter-question: what is the primary purpose for expending the entire voting power of the hub (the attention capacity of which can be thought of as an expendable resource) on the removal of an individual from a council? In a world with…

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Hello there,
IMO, if we believe in the council principle I think it is better to let the council vote for removing members or not. (2/3 is a good majority btw)

if community can vote to exclude one or more members it could become matter of individuals while council is a tool for collective intelligence and consensus decision making.
I would like to see a council with various background and more importantly different visions working together here.

Bearing in mind that council can be removed and will then be if some members are unbearable for the community and are not voted out by the council itself.

Sacha, Udit, and Youssef I appreciate the work you’ve put into creating this document and admire your desire to create a charter that sets rules of engagement for Cosmos and Atom holders. There’s a lot I like about this Charter: • It aims to set high-level values for the Hub and its stakeholders • It describes the different components of the Hub • It objectively describes the Hub’s governance mechanics Anyone new to Cosmos who reads this walks away with a super clear understanding of how things work and what is expected from them as citizens. Values > Freedoms Section I comes off as somewhat rebellious or defiant and could be framed in a more positive and forward-looking tone. With this in mind, it should be renamed to Values or Guiding Principles of the Hub , instead of defining Freedoms afforded to stakeholders. Chapter 1 Freedom to Disobey (to Resist Censorship) stems from abiding by the principles of Credible Neutrality as described by Vitalik . By being credibly neutral, one can expect the Hub to reject censorship, respect property rights and follow on-chain protocol rules like slashing. It’s a far more powerful and assertive principle that encourages…

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Should we include a basic set of VALUES for the Hub, which the Cosmos citizens can agree to strive towards as higher ideals? Agreeing upon VALUES can have utility for a few reasons: • to inspire & hold each other in-check as we collaborate within the community • to prepare the community to make hard choices that involve VALUE tradeoffs; including to guide the investment decisions of subDAOs • to highlight our VALUES to prospective citizens & builders who might consider joining the Cosmos federation Two values that I’ve observed as universal for citizens of the Cosmos Hub: SAFETY & SUSTAINABILITY. Why? All communities who plug-in at the Hub will need SAFETY & SUSTAINABILITY, as the duality of becoming specialized as a chain and also relying on services provided by other chains within the meta-economy requires necessarily having access to trade and security arrangements across the Hub, so that trust and flow can flourish. If the Hub breaks down, trust, flow, and access to services in the meta-economy break down, and we all get poor. If the hub breaks down, the great promise 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + … + 1 = infinity, ie. the true abundant state of trust & flow within our…

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Ah, so nice to see this perspective it seems we are vibing on the same wavelength. I like how you’ve distilled the underpinning values out of the document (credible neutrality, free & open markets, freedom of association, and open source). Could we distill 2 and 3 on your list to just “Liberty & freedom” - i.e. even higher level abstraction? Or is the added specificity of two bullet points useful or even somehow essential in your mind?

Lets get these values figured out, sir!

Really great discussion so far. I’ll just mention a few items I think may be useful (and potentially controversial) to incorporate.

1. White label disclosure - Any validator using the infrastructure or business entity of another validator on the Cosmos Hub should make this disclosure via on-chain transaction.
2. Liquid stake governance attacks - The Hub should take steps to mitigate malicious scenarios including loans to instantaneously acquire and exploit voting power via liquid staked assets.
3. Centralized exchange opt-out - Centralized exchanges choosing not to participate consistently in on-chain governance should signal long-term opt-out via on-chain transaction. [elective removal from quorum could be considered at a later date]

Can we add an article requiring the councils to post invoices on chain for all budget expenses.

I think it makes sense to have gross budgets for sure, but you don’t want things like individual salaries or individual vendor expenses on-chain because that hurts organizational competitiveness and trusted relationships that require discretion. So total headcount expenditure and totals for specific functions is a good compromise. Also easier for external parties to digest.

Hello! here are a few of my questions Article 20 – could you elaborate on examples of the special initiatives? Will this be events similar to cosmoverse? Tbh I wasn’t impressed with the last cosmoverse. Good alpha, but not enough professionalism, too much unnecessary goofing off, and it was expensive. I just don’t want to end up eventually paying for a council(members) Fiji vacation. I hope this doesn’t sound salty, I’m not, I’m just curious and want to lay my cards on the table as well Article 23 – why can a proposal ask for up to 10% of the entire treasury? Why not 3% or 5%? How did we land on 10%? I know it makes divisibility easier, but that seems to me to be an extraordinary amount of money for any given project to develop. Maybe a 3% with the option to increase to 7% with a stakeholder, community council, and bootstrap council general vote? Article 31 – I would be more inclined toward this with a 3rd initial committee for decentralization/checks and balances OR if there were term limits to all council positions. Elaborating on that; considering that we delegators will be voting the original council members in, why not just make a council election every 2-3 years? I am…

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I think it would be wise to cap the max percent of the treasury’s budget that can go to one specific protocol. (Ex. If 6 million atoms are set aside for liquid staking atom, only 5% (300k) can go to any liquid staking provider i.e QuickSilver, Lido, etc.) this would help prevent the hub from choosing winners in our ecosystem and allow for free markets to continue.

a % tax to the community pool inherently reflects the performance of the council and its subsidization policy which should increase proportionally to its successfully increasing growth of the hub. It also makes it so delegators continue to be rewarded with ownership of the chain for securing the network if acquiring atom is not gate kept by the treasury.

Ruging delegator rewards, by changing rewards from ownership of the chain to IBC fiat, privatizes the chain. It funnels governance of the chain away from the community as a whole and centralizes the chain under the council’s arbitrarily subsidized entities of similar ideology with a greater proportion of chain ownership at the same time reducing the say and ownership of the community as a whole &
resulting in the reduced ability for delegators to vote contrary to the council.

Atom 2.0 structure also lacks any coherent argument refuting its being a security.

Introduction Hello everyone, I am ala.tusz.am, although some of you may know me as abra tusz. I make this post as a representative of a group of friends and community members that have been seeking grassroots changes within the ecosystem for the past couple of years. We ( @ticojohnny , @RobbStack , @JD-Lorax , @CosmonautPorge , @valeh_cosmos ) are composed of passionate Cosmonauts working both independently and with different Cosmos based organizations. Our members hail from around the world. We represent diverse views but are held together by a binding interest in the vision of Cosmos. We have organized calls to review the Charter article by article, and deliberate on the significance, implications, and open questions within each written line. The appended document is the outcome of our first two calls toward this effort, and spans the preamble to Article 28. These revisions only represent our own, individually held viewpoints, and are not representative of the stance of any organization. We hope the following will be helpful for all governance participants, both in order to clarify any questions that the community holds and to create a stronger, more capture-resistant set…

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Great Draft. Lov e how detailed it is

Hi Seb. Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. I’ll address some of your points here (the ones I feel most strongly about) and leave the minor squabbles for a subsequent post. Section I comes off as somewhat rebellious or defiant and could be framed in a more positive and forward-looking tone. With this in mind, it should be renamed to Values or Guiding Principles of the Hub, instead of defining Freedoms afforded to stakeholders. So defiance here is a feature, not a bug. If you look at constitutions that were forged during a period of great social upheaval (which I would argue we in today), they tend to be defiant in nature. The Bill of Rights is the emblematic example of this The reason for this is that you need your values to be expressed strongly and clearly enough in order for them to act as an effective social schelling point in the darkest of times. Freedom to Disobey (to Resist Censorship) stems from abiding by the principles of Credible Neutrality as described by Vitalik. By being credibly neutral, one can expect the Hub to reject censorship, respect property rights and follow on-chain protocol rules like slashing. It’s a far more powerful and…

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Thank you for this! Some questions: Article 23: what is the motivation for this? why not more often than once a year? why max 10%? Article 25: How does the yearly budget relate to the treasury funding? If a yearly budget is passed, is the release of funds throughout the year still subject to governance approval? If so, how? Can ATOM stakers veto specific items in a budget? Article 27: What are assembly proposals? Does releasing funds from treasury require an assembly proposal, similar to a community spend proposal? If so, how would Article 28 (treasury asset management) be implemented? How would Article 40 (streaming funds) be implemented? Article 34: Small matter, just a suggestion to improve illustration: the “voting weight” as described by “seats” in the whitepaper has a very low cardinality (say, 5 seats) - is this intentional? How many councils do the authors envision being in the assembly? Say there is a small council for dev tooling or similar; what should its voting weight be as compared to, say, an allocator council? Article 38: Shouldn’t the personnel budget be released on a monthly basis (not "remains with the council?) How are funds earmarked as and released…

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If we are on the topic of promoting multisig councils, can we at least have them get money ONLY via an on chain governance vote. I.e. instead of the council having free funds, they should present each case for on chain governance to get funding. I,E.

MINIMIZE THE POWER of the council to mere investigation, research and preparation.

PR’s welcome github.com hyphacoop/cosmos-hub-charter/blob/main/CHARTER.md ``` # Cosmos Hub Charter # Preamble This Working Charter of the Cosmos Hub is a transitory document. It is jointly established by members of the Cosmos Hub community, and adopted by us on `DD-MM-YYYY` through an on-chain vote. The Working Charter will remain in effect no more than four years from the date of its adoption. After that, authority over governance will be ceded to a future Constitution (that incorporates the lessons of the Hub’s prior governance experiments). The Cosmos Network is an association of economically connected sovereign communities. It is a voluntary association of blockchains that subscribe to a philosophy of sovereign interoperability, localism, and pluralism – a network of networks that uphold the right for communities to maintain technological sovereignty and interoperability. The Charter enables the philosophy of sovereign interoperability by upholding three freedoms: the freedom to disobey, the freedom to move, and the freedom to create and transform social relationships. # Section I. Freedoms ## Chapter 1. Freedom to Disobey (to Resist Censorship) ###…

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You’re welcome github.com/hyphacoop/cosmos-hub-charter Update Section 1 titles for clarity `hyphacoop:main` ← `seb2point0:main` opened 06:06PM - 26 Oct 22 UTC seb2point0 +3 -3 Thanks for your response. Though I’m not fully on board with the posture of the charter, I understand your position and arguments for being explicitly defiant. I think Chapters 1, 2, and 3 titles need work. Beyond the aesthetics of having the most important chapters of the charter have parenthesis, I feel they need to be clear and bold. For example, Freedom to Disobey and Resist Censorship are two different concepts – the title lacks clarity. Articles 1 through 5 mostly argue for the right to censorship resistance rather than disobedience so maybe that should be kept. Similar remarks for Chapter 2 – it isn’t clear what Move means and it isn’t a concept used in crypto to describe forking. I favor Freedom to Fork . Chapter 3 is the most confusing. Maybe it should be something like Freedom to Participate , which hints at the open, permissionless nature of the Hub. So I suggest: • Freedom from…

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Lots of questions and thoughts being raised here don’t have clear answers - this is a community effort so if there is a concern over an article, please make a PR and start working on it yourself! Some clarification to questions I see in the thread: @bIllYTHeSQuid Article 34 – Can someone elaborate on the last sentence in this article? “The proposal must include the voting weight that the council will have in the Assembly” When a council applies to join the Assembly, they must identify how much voting power they will have in the Assembly as a whole (and thus how all other councils’ voting weight will change). For example, if the Community Council and Bootstrap Council each start off with 50% voting weight, a third council applying to join may specify that they want 20% voting power while the Community Council and Bootstrap Council each retain 40% voting weight. Article 53 (renumbered) - What does a fully fledged council look like? Can someone paint me a picture? We don’t have examples in the context of the Cosmos Hub right now, but there are examples on other networks. Optimism for example has a bicameral governance structure, where there are two houses…

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From a recent Twitter discussion here is a summary list of values mentioned by various individuals within the Cosmos Hub community & listed here in no particular order:

a home for visionaries
accountability
$atom stakers always have final say (no constitutional or Assembly level blocks to staker decisions)
decentralization
empowerment of communities
equitable
ethos
freedom thru sovereignty
honesty
market anarchy philosophy
minimalism & predictability of cosmoshub
neutral
neutral w/ no expression of values
pragmatism
privacy
quasi-libertarian free mkt spirit
right to fork
right to hire contractors
right to shared security
right to use IBC
robustness
safety
scalability
security
simplicity
sustainability
transparency, all community funds will be dispersed on chain
transparency for institutions, privacy for the individual
values should be emergent, logical, quantifiable & defined in an enforceable way
wholeness in the totality (of the federation)

Hi, this is Gorany from Cosmostation team. I’ve got some questions and thoughts on the Charter as I was reading through it. sacha: Article 16 The purpose of the Community Pool is to ensure each community member has the ability to request funds for any initiative that ATOM stakers deem worthy of support. sacha: Article 20 The purpose of the Treasury is to support the maintenance of R&D excellence in the Cosmos Hub and its related technologies, and to support special initiatives that increase adoption, growth, and capitalization of the ATOM economic zone, including public works and opportunities for expansion, turning ATOM into the preferred interchain reserve asset. • It seems the purpose of the Community Pool encompasses the purpose of the Treasury. Why is there a need to establish the Treasury instead of utilizing the Community Pool? And what would the “public works” mentioned in the Article 20 be like? Are wallets and block explorers considered “public works”? sacha: Article 23 An Assembly proposal can request that a portion of the Treasury flow back to the Distribution module. The proposal may not ask for more than 10%…

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Hi, VK from S16 here.

I have some questions:

sacha:

Article 23

An Assembly proposal can request that a portion of the Treasury flow back to the Distribution module. The proposal may not ask for more than 10% of the value of the Treasury, and there must be a minimum interval of 1 year between such successful proposals.

What’s the definition of the value of the treasury? Is it the total value? Remaining value? Profit?

In the Allocator, we have Covenant and Rebalancer. Who will create the strategies, and who will run this? Suppose we made a bad investment. Who is responsible for it?
I read the charter definition of each role, but it’s not very clear to me.

Thanks.

Article 4 and 5 is problematic because it may be more prodent that at the point in time to decide whether a slash or fork would be more appropriate. For example if a number of malicious events occur it might be more sensible to slash at each event than to fork each event…

@Gorany Article 16 , Article 20 : It seems the purpose of the Community Pool encompasses the purpose of the Treasury. Why is there a need to establish the Treasury instead of utilizing the Community Pool? And what would the “public works” mentioned in the Article 20 be like? Are wallets and block explorers considered “public works”? The structure of having both the Treasury and the Community Pool follows from the ATOM 2.0 vision document; it’s not a new proposal in the Charter. The Charter seeks to define the purpose of both of them, so if you think it’s not clear enough, please go ahead and make a PR! A major difference is that the Treasury can’t be directly accessed by tokenholder governance the way the Community Pool can. The definition of ‘public works’ is up to the Assembly (i.e., The councils that make up the Assembly) since that’s the body that will vote on allocating Treasury funds (subject to token holder veto). I also think there’s a PR in the works to better define the mission of the Treasury, so maybe that will become clearer as people continue to work. Article 23 : What’s the purpose of limiting the flow back to the Distribution module? I thought the…

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I would like to request an additional document to go along with the charter when this proposal is put up for a vote. The community has been worried about misuse of funds and conflicts of interest. However I think those are nonstarters. Its more important to focus on collusion and insider trading laws. As such, I think the concerns of the community could be assuaged with the following information in a document: • An example of an assembly structure with budget projections. • In the bootstrap council: How many lawyers, how many treasury managers, how many tech people? • Salaries for each member & Hypothetical Allocator investments with hypothetical budget proposal • Insight into payment and law • How does payment work? (Does the treasury set up an LLC or S-corp?) • Will council members be covered by labor laws? • Will council members be subject to insider trading and collusion laws? • Are these laws enforceable? I understand that the council structure (1) is up to the community to decide. However, there is nothing concrete to discuss. Having an example would be helpful in guiding the community’s direction regarding councils and in dispelling gripes…

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After reading through everything here, I want to try to contribute some thoughts. Whatever you make out of my half baked criticisms, the endeavor of creating the charter is in my opinion not even a great, but necessary undertaking. Hats off to what you already did! • Some general remarks I think the first 19 articles contain a lot of good ideas. However they seem to be a weird mix of negative (art. 1, 2, 3, 4) and positive freedoms ( Positive and Negative Liberty (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) ) and some duties (art. 5, 8, 9 ,12). The headlines though implicate that only positive freedoms are discussed. Besides the technical ambiguity, I think aiming to distribute negative freedoms might be a bit ambitious given that this power currently still sadly lies with our different national states. A declaration of strong alignment with for example the basic humans rights (containing mentioned freedom of speech or property rights) should still be a very good starting point. Nonetheless I agree with the general idea of proposing some positive freedoms or maybe values as already suggested in the thread. As a society with voluntary affiliation it’s reasonable to formulate…

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sacha:

Since this Charter is contingent on approval of the whitepaper, the Charter can only be voted on after the whitepaper has been ratified by ATOM stakers

What happened to the charter discussion after prop 82 was vetoed?

Do you guys think we can still come back to this discussion? Is it still relevant?

sacha:

Sacha, Udit, and Youssef

I do think the Charter is still relevant, although not in its current form since prop 82 was rejected. It will likely need to be revamped.