Issue 59 - March 30 - April 29 2023
Image credit: @sænder
Treasury balance: 807,615 DCR (approx +7,890 DCR/month) - $16.1 million (+$149K/month) based on $18.85 DCR price
New Proposals
Decred Vanguard: A New Outreach Effort
Published Apr 18 by exitus, last edited Apr 21 | 29 comments
This proposal requests a budget of $46,784 to fund a “community-driven outreach program with the purpose of injecting Decred into discussions all across the Internet”. There would be 25 available positions in the Decred Vanguard team, each participant would receive $100/month in compensation for their efforts, with an additional 3 members receiving an extra $100 per month as a prize, with the additional availability of another $100 prize for a contribution from someone who is not a member of Decred Vanguard. Vanguard members would aim to energize the community, grow the community, increase awareness of Decred’s features and tools and create quality art and memes. The program would be run by @exitus and @tivra, and people who want to join should contact them. Efforts would be organized through a “war room” bridged across Bison Relay, Matrix, and Discord, and contributors will have access to tools like Twitter Blue (premium Twitter features), Midjourney (AI-generated images), and ElevenLabs (AI-generated voice-overs). Most of the budget is split between the stipends ($2,500/month) and paying the two admins ($2,400/month), on top of the monthly expenses limit of $5,598 x 8 an additional $2,000 is requested for discretionary spending.
Most of the comments are entirely supportive of the proposal, with one in depth thread questioning the size of the admin budget.
Published Apr 17 by btcecho, last edited Apr 27 | 17 comments
This proposal requests $9,500 for a three month engagement during which BTC-ECHO, a German crypto site, would create and publish two sponsored articles, including “social media booster” promotion to their 115K followers across various platforms. The package also includes a podcast ad to be read by one of the podcast hosts and run for two weeks. Content for the articles and ads would be agreed with Decred community representatives. This proposal is being suggested as the start of a longer term relationship.
Many comments thank BTC-ECHO for taking the time to submit the proposal, some questioning the value it offers or requesting additional elements. BTC-ECHO has engaged with the commenters to address their questions and edited the proposal to improve clarity around their scant previous mentions of Decred and push the start date forward by two weeks (to May 15).
Approved Proposals
Change PoW/PoS Subsidy Split to 1⁄89 and Change PoW Algorithm to BLAKE3
Published Mar 27 by jy-p | 96 comments (+53)
Final voting figures: 97% Yes votes, 62% turnout of eligible tickets.
Recap: This proposal is about making some changes to the consensus rules: changing the PoW algorithm to BLAKE3 (thus rendering all existing Decred ASICs useless) and changing the subsidy split to 1⁄89, reducing the PoW share of rewards to 1%. The subsidy split change is an accentuation of a previous change which already saw a 60⁄30 split in favour of miners switch to 10⁄80 in favour of PoS ticket voters. The change of PoW algorithm would ensure that the existing miners, including the “malicious mining cartel” which is being targeted by this proposal, lose their dominance of the PoW aspect of consensus and the associated rewards. The proposed drop to 1% of rewards for PoW is intended to make the development of new ASICs or equivalent for Decred unprofitable, and therefore unlikely. The proposal references Monero’s ASIC-resistance and RandomX but concludes that RandomX is too heavy for Decred’s needs. The proposal requests a budget of $20,000 to implement the changes, and this work is estimated to take 2-4 weeks to complete, at which point the consensus upgrade/voting process could begin.
Published Mar 27 by joegruff, last edited Mar 28 | 8 comments (+1)
Final voting figures: 87% Yes votes, 39% turnout of eligible tickets.
Recap: This proposal requests a budget of $20,500 to integrate the Ledger hardware with Decrediton and allow users to send and receive DCR using a wallet stored on their Ledger device. This proposal does not include any work that would require firmware changes from Ledger, because it is deemed unlikely for these to be accepted within a reasonable timeframe - as a result it is limited to ordinary transactions and will not allow for PoS participation, because this requires message signing and that is not supported by the Ledger firmware presently. The proposed integration would only support standard transactions, so payments from TSpends or ticket votes would likely cause problems. The budget consists of $5,000 payment in arrears for work on a proof of concept, $500 for 3 Ledger devices for developers to use, and $15,000 for the development work, which would be led and largely completed by @joegruff. The work is given an estimate of six months for completion, which is described as an overestimate to allow for merging bottlenecks.
About this issue
Content for this edition was authored by @richardred with fixes from @bee.
Image credit: @sænder