Issue 8 - Dec 5 - Dec 11 2018

Proposals under discussion

Decred Open Source Research proposal 2 - research projects - submitted Nov 21 by richard-red, appeared Nov 26th, edited Dec 11th - 40 comments (+15)

There were 3 new top-level comments this week, Decred git/contributor analysis, Novel ways to increase network effect, and adversarial research. @richard-red updated the proposal on Dec 11 to list 3 initial projects being worked on (Pi Research, Decred git/contributor Analysis, Decred Media Performance), and noted that there are several further strong and well-supported ideas which could start work if they were better operationalized. Some of these projects added to the list had 4 points, less than 5 which was set as a threshold. It is not clear that enough comment voting can be sustained on a proposal over time to allow the comment up/down votes to be really useful.

Stable coin - USDD - submitted Nov 29 by fabianreum, appeared Dec 4 - 9 comments (+8)

Comments offer thorough and damning criticism of this proposal for a Decred backed stablecoin, in short form from @nnnko56, long form from @ryanzim.

Add Decred support to Coffee Wallet - submitted Nov 29 by francio, appeared Dec 4 - 7 comments (+7)

This proposal asks for 150 DCR to fund work on integrating DCR wallet support into Coffee Wallet, an open source multi coin wallet with a portfolio tracker. Comments indicate that although the fee being requested is quite reasonable, it may not be a good idea for Decred to start paying for wallet integrations. The proposal owner has offered to reduce the requested amount to 75 DCR.

Decred Bug Bounty Proposal - submitted Nov 30 by degeri, appeared Dec 4 - 7 comments (+5)

@degeri continued to edit the proposal in response to community feedback, tightening the scope and adding a clarification about not paying out for bugs reported before the program starts. On Dec 10 @degeri authorized the start of voting.

Rejected proposals

Decred Radio Advertising, 190+ FM and AM Stations, + Intl. Satellite - voting closed Dec 11 - 52 comments (+27)

3,090 Yes votes, 6,917 No votes (30.9% Yes) - voter participation of 24.4%, support from 7.5% of tickets.

Discussion on this proposal continued to be lively as voting took place, with many replies from the proposal owners. Key points raised this week were 1) who produces the ads? 2) What do Ditto think? (not the right time for paid advertising), and 3) 30 second spots and banner ads are not the right approach for Decred. @guang also reported that some members of the Chinese Decred community had done some searching and found similar proposals to the Dash and SmartCash treasuries.

Decredex - voting closed Dec 11 - 43 comments (+0)

456 Yes votes, 11,008 No votes (4% Yes) - voter participation of 28%, support from 1.1% of tickets.

Decred integration into Crypto-ATMs - voting closed Dec 11 - 34 comments (+2)

1,448 Yes votes, 11,388 No votes (11.3% Yes) - voter participation of 31.4%, support from 3.5% of tickets

Proposals update

@Dustorf continued to provide updates on the relationship with Ditto, which formally began at the start of December. This update in the #Marketing channel offered details of a meeting with Ditto in New York.

jy-p and I met with the DittoPA team today for about 2-¹⁄₂ hours in Brooklyn. They had dome a significant amount of work reviewing Decred’s marketing materials (off Github), website, blogs, reddit, social media, Medium, etc. We also went through the story of btcsuite, memcoin2, and Decred. We began the discussion by talking about targeting and arrived upon the following five segments:

1. Developers-back-end devs are currently the bottleneck. We discussed a strategy to target people who have full-time jobs, but are looking for more fulfilling work they can do on the side.
2. Individual investors/contributors-people who are knowledgeable about crypto, see the existing system as corrupt and broken, are tech-savvy and concerned with privacy
3. Institutions-We’re looking for the smart money institutions like Placeholder who understand that Decred is built for the long run, and are excited to actively participate and contribute to the project
4. Media-outreach to spread the Decred story, make those groups above aware of what we’re doing and how it’s relevant to them
5. Governments-demonstrate to states and municipalities that Decred’s Politeia time-stamping system has myriad applications that can be freely used and can make lives better

Politeia Discussions

The subject of the quorum requirement came up again on Monday, when it looked like all 3 proposals that were open for voting would end with a number of votes that didn’t meet the 20% quorum requirement. The question of how that outcome should be interpreted was discussed again. It looks like there is consensus that failing to reach 20% ticket participation is a failed state for proposals. There is also a common understanding that higher voter participation, and proposals meeting that requirement in the negative case, is highly desirable.

One suggestion to increase participation levels was to extend the voting period. This is set on a per-proposal basis to a default of 2016 blocks (7 days), and every proposal has had this same 7 day voting period thus far. For large stakeholders, voting may be quite inconvenient as it requires unlocking the wallet that controls the tickets, which involves security considerations. Voting on more proposals in a session is a way to maximize the efficiency of the overall voting process.

Politeia analysis

I did a little analysis of the ticket voting data to see how common it is for people to vote on multiple proposals in a session. For the first 9 proposals that have finished voting, there are 106,258 votes from 36,817 different tickets. For each vote that was not the ticket’s first vote, I looked at the time difference since that ticket’s previous vote. Of the 69,441 votes which were not first votes, 35,404 (52.4%) were cast in the same commit (hour) as the previous vote, i.e. the ticket was used to vote for both proposals at around the same time. A further 2,356 (3.4%) of votes appeared in a subsequent block to the previous vote on a different proposal. Voting on multiple proposals in a session is common.

I also had a look at how many proposals tickets have been voting on, see figure below. There are 925 tickets that have voted on every proposal so far. The majority of tickets that were eligible for the first proposals will have voted on-chain before voting started for the most recent round of proposals. At least stakeholders can get extra Pi votes from their slow-to-be-called tickets now!

About this issue

Content for this edition was authored by @richardred, with contributions from @bee.

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Snapshot

Now at the bottom, per this suggestion.