We should reduce the cost of proposals.

[TheDashGuy]

This would create an environment where smaller more useful projects can be funded without having to "risk" 5 Dash which is becoming ever more valuable by the day.

We want to see the budget fund items worth 100$ or less here and there for smaller awareness projects and to help the Nodes "vote" on ideas within the community at the same time. SO why don't we get rid of this huge barrier to entry and stop charging $25-35 to submit a proposal....

Thoughts?

 

[Solarminer]

How about we do 0.5 Dash for less than 100 dash proposals and 5 Dash for over 100 Dash proposals? It would encourage proposals less than 100 Dash for a smaller fee and encourage more effort to submit larger proposals.

 

[TheDashGuy]

How about we do 0.5 Dash for less than 100 dash proposals and 5 Dash for over 100 Dash proposals? It would encourage proposals less than 100 Dash for a smaller fee and encourage more effort to submit larger proposals.

We also need better standards and proposals should require better information than some have in the past, having smaller budget proposals would keep the nodes on their toes and keep people excited at the same time, we could learn alot from cheaper smaller proposals and not be learning these lessons on the bigger more risky ones....

 

[Solarminer]

The only way to enforce standards for submitting proposals is to not vote for proposals without all the info. The system is decentralized and anyone can submit a proposal to the block chain with a description. The only two proposals without detail on how expenses will be used are core-team and public awareness. Oh, wait, I mean exchange awareness. So now the entire title and description are not even correct.

I must have missed the last 8 paycheck postings, but this is in the description of core-team:
We will be 100% transparent about who on our team is paid and how much they are paid.

We really should split this up into smaller proposals. Core-team 12.1 / electrum / evolution etc. This is slowly happening. This can be also be a way to decide what gets worked on first. And no I don't expect to know what each person is actually paid, just pointing out that the description doesn't match the results.

 

[daf]

5 Dash is fine. Does the community want to be flooded by proposals?

 

[TaoOfSatoshi]

5 Dash is fine. Does the community want to be flooded by proposals?

Agreed. No need to invite spam. The 5 Dash fee is a deterrent to that.

 

[Otaci]

How about setting up a fund to cover small projects, run by trusted people, funded by a specific amount? 100 DASH per month? 200? that kind of figure

The trusted people

• decide on projects
• report on success/failure

DASH Foundation?

If confidence is lost in the way the fund is being managed, withdraw funding.

A current example: the guy who wants sponsorship to run in a marathon - he needs 100 DASH (about?) - surely we dont need 3000+ masternodes to vote on that?

The budget system is cool, but I dont think it should be used to micro-manage. It could be used to allocate funds at the strategic level.

 

[SnowHater]

The budget system is cool, but I dont think it should be used to micro-manage. It could be used to allocate funds at the strategic level.

For micro-managing some subsidiaries or ministers of DGBB could be created.

 

[HinnomTX]

I think the 5 DASH fee, which started out as a $15 fee but now sits at about $35, could be adjusted slightly to account for the rising value of DASH. A 3 DASH fee seems pretty safe, i.e. a $21 fee will still keep the spam away. The quality and rate of proposals coming in are impressive, and we should encourage this behavior without imposing a stifling fee.
If we make adjustments as if DASH will rise in the future, it just might.

 

[Lebubar]

Why no option to have (more than) > 5 DASH in the poll ?

 

[Solarminer]

5 Dash is fine. Does the community want to be flooded by proposals?

Yes, I want a lot of small proposals with more diverse creative talent. We won't get that with a large fee to submit them. Maybe a lot of the masternodes decide not to vote on the small proposals. Only need 10% yes to pass so it doesn't require 100% participation. It also allows the option for certain votes without significant expense.

If you have micro-proposals owned by a project manager, you are stuck having a well known core person wasting time managing, providing updates, etc. Decentralize it, save time, and let the process do the work.

As for spam, it isn't a 30 second process to submit a proposal. It takes time and requires some reading, at this point just the difficulty in submitting a proposal is probably enough to discourage spam.

 

[TheDashGuy]

Why no option to have (more than) > 5 DASH in the poll ?

We are trying to create LESS barrier to entry not more.

 

[raganius]

5 DASH is still a fair price for proposal submission. It should not be changed, IMO, at current DASH prices. (From my point of view, when the DASH price exceeds ±20USD, then it might start to become "expensive".

As I see it, if one does not have enough belief in his own proposal (enough belief as to justify the 5 DASH fee payment) this means the proposal is not "relevant" (this person should abstain from submitting such proposal, first of all).

Also, my opinion is that all the fees paid for proposal submissions should be 100% directed for the DASH Foundation budget, instead of burned... but I understand that this may be a controversial idea, anyway.

Yes, I want a lot of small proposals with more diverse creative talent. We won't get that with a large fee to submit them. Maybe a lot of the masternodes decide not to vote on the small proposals. Only need 10% yes to pass so it doesn't require 100% participation. It also allows the option for certain votes without significant expense.

If you have micro-proposals owned by a project manager, you are stuck having a well known core person wasting time managing, providing updates, etc. Decentralize it, save time, and let the process do the work.

As for spam, it isn't a 30 second process to submit a proposal. It takes time and requires some reading, at this point just the difficulty in submitting a proposal is probably enough to discourage spam.

The problem is the system being flooded with tiny unimportant "not so relevant" proposals, with people "left, right and centre" spamming proposals that, instead of contributing to the improvement of the system, will only create a mess and a decrease in decision quality....

... not everything has to necessarily pass through the voting system: there are many "tiny" decisions that are not "worthwhile" enough to justify moving the system, and so risking confusing/dispersing the attention of the community/voters.

 

[UdjinM6]

We decided to go with 5 DASH for reasons and here are few of them.

...
As for spam, it isn't a 30 second process to submit a proposal. It takes time and requires some reading, at this point just the difficulty in submitting a proposal is probably enough to discourage spam.

Not on the technical level
If the price were too low one can make 1000 proposals literally in minutes via a simple script creating a little chaos there and to remove them we'd have to vote all of them down. But by casting that many votes we'd probably crash some of low-end MNs (current version of DGBB it's not very well optimized memory wise).

Another reason is - it has to be high enough to encourage proposal submitter to think twice before submitting and to discuss his proposal first to get as much replies as possible to predict the possible voting outcome.

With that being said, it doesn't really matter is it 5 DASH or even 15 DASH fee (note: higher, not lower for reasons I described above): if it's a valuable proposal and you are quite confident that it should pass (e.g. you have tons of positive feedback in replies) - you can simply reimburse them by including another 5/15/whateverthefeeis DASH into you proposal price.

 

[buster]

Why no option to have (more than) > 5 DASH in the poll ?

You can always start your own tread bud.

Anyways to the real discussion, 5 dash seems fine to me though TheDashGuy. If we lower it oaxaca and me are gonna be doing interviews every day lol.

I like what Otaci had to say about micro managing though.

 

[tungfa]

remember we should keep this simple !
more proposals will come (this is just the beginning)
different fees + payback or whatnot will way complicate this !

5 Dash is in place for a reason
we should keep it as is (as that part is proven to work)

 

[GreyGhost]

I get the logic for it sounds sound.

But I disagree with static thinking here. Once 1 DASH is $1,000.00 these 5 DASH would dwarf many proposal's budget. Why not employ some forward-thinking and get ready about various outcomes NOW and not wait for the problem to pop up and say, for example: simply scale the fee to be proportionate, but not prohibitive, to the proposals budgets?

 

[tungfa]

I get the logic for it sounds sound.

But I disagree with static thinking here. Once 1 DASH is $1,000.00 these 5 DASH would dwarf many proposal's budget. Why not employ some forward-thinking and get ready about various outcomes NOW and not wait for the problem to pop up and say, for example: simply scale the fee to be proportionate, but not prohibitive, to the proposals budgets?

does not work as we will still get spammed to death !

Example
Proposal for 10 Dash for xxx (whatever)
say 1% of proposals will be fee (as you speaking of 1k US$ per Dash in the future)
0.1 Dash Fee and there we are Spam Central !

No need to think what happens when Dash his 1k US$, i think we have time to figure this out until then

 

[GreyGhost]

does not work as we will still get spammed to death !
Example
Proposal for 10 Dash for xxx (whatever)
say 1% of proposals will be fee (as you speaking of 1k US$ per Dash in the future)
0.1 Dash Fee and there we are Spam Central !

Sure, but the "scale" can start at 5 DASH. if–then–else or an equivalent in the code can take care of the scale once DASH is $20.00 / $100.00 / $500.00 / $1,000.00 etc...

No need to think what happens when Dash his 1k US$, i think we have time to figure this out until then

Famous last words. "No need to think," until the car hits the wall, the credit cards are maxed out, the mortgage payment is due, until the leak is bigger...

 

[tungfa]

Sure, but the "scale" can start at 5 DASH. if–then–else or an equivalent in the code can take care of the scale once DASH is $20.00 / $100.00 / $500.00 / $1,000.00 etc...



Famous last words. "No need to think," until the car hits the wall, the credit cards are maxed out, the mortgage payment is due, until the leak is bigger...

LoL

 

[UdjinM6]

I get the logic for it sounds sound.

But I disagree with static thinking here. Once 1 DASH is $1,000.00 these 5 DASH would dwarf many proposal's budget. Why not employ some forward-thinking and get ready about various outcomes NOW and not wait for the problem to pop up and say, for example: simply scale the fee to be proportionate, but not prohibitive, to the proposals budgets?

This won't happen overnight so I think we have some time here
I don't see how proportional fee would work tbh... And patching fee amount once in awhile should solve the "issue" of price jump more or less - we can make fee lower (in DASH) in some new version and old budgets still would be valid (though outdated masternodes will reject new budgets with lower fee but we can drop such MNs off the list by bumping protocol version as usual). Having fee lower (in DASH) in this case shouldn't bring too much troubles (spam wise) because with higher DASH/$ rate 1) spam still would cost a lot 2) MNs should be able to use better hardware i.e should be able to handle more proposals/votes.

 

[fernando]

This won't happen overnight so I think we have some time here
I don't see how proportional fee would work tbh... And patching fee amount once in awhile should solve the "issue" of price jump more or less - we can make fee lower (in DASH) in some new version and old budgets still would be valid (though outdated masternodes will reject new budgets with lower fee but we can drop such MNs off the list by bumping protocol version as usual). Having fee lower (in DASH) in this case shouldn't bring too much troubles (spam wise) because with higher DASH/$ rate 1) spam still would cost a lot 2) MNs should be able to use better hardware i.e should be able to handle more proposals/votes.

Good to get the opinion of someone who actually knows how things are coded and what can be easily done or not!

In this one I was gonna agree with the ones asking for a reduction because I would prefer more smaller proposals of all types (I, for one, would have made one to get reimbursed for the expenses I had traveling to present to the Internet Freedom Festival, but I decided it didn't make sense to pay 5 dash to MAYBE get back around 30). However, the argument that you can take down masternodes by flooding the system convinced me that 5 dash is ok if it can eventually be changed. I don't think we would have too many proposals, but a cheap attack to take down masternodes is not a vector attack we should not leave open. If there is risk of that, I prefer to have to group the micro proposals.

 

[GreyGhost]

This won't happen overnight so I think we have some time here
I don't see how proportional fee would work tbh... And patching fee amount once in awhile should solve the "issue" of price jump more or less - we can make fee lower (in DASH) in some new version and old budgets still would be valid (though outdated masternodes will reject new budgets with lower fee but we can drop such MNs off the list by bumping protocol version as usual). Having fee lower (in DASH) in this case shouldn't bring too much troubles (spam wise) because with higher DASH/$ rate 1) spam still would cost a lot 2) MNs should be able to use better hardware i.e should be able to handle more proposals/votes.

So, what you're saying is, instead of bothering with coding every eventuality we just adjust the system as we go? As Fernando just said, it is great to "get the opinion of someone who actually knows how things are coded and what can be easily done or not!"

I'm only not sure how would a cheap attack take down Masternodes? Is this really possible?

 

[fernando]

So, what you're saying is, instead of bothering with coding every eventuality we just adjust the system as we go? As Fernando just said, it is great to "get the opinion of someone who actually knows how things are coded and what can be easily done or not!"

I'm only not sure how would a cheap attack take down Masternodes? Is this really possible?

I'm talking about this previous message he posted:

We decided to go with 5 DASH for reasons and here are few of them.


Not on the technical level
If the price were too low one can make 1000 proposals literally in minutes via a simple script creating a little chaos there and to remove them we'd have to vote all of them down. But by casting that many votes we'd probably crash some of low-end MNs (current version of DGBB it's not very well optimized memory wise).

If by script submitting+paying for 1000 proposals you can take down a bunch of masternodes and create some havoc, we better make that expensive.

 

[stan.distortion]

1% of total requested makes sense here too, maybe with a lower limit to put some sort of cap on spamming small proposals but I'd like to see a lot more small proposals and the fixed fee makes that difficult, that 5 Dash may be all someone is asking for in return for some artwork or a simple android app but they'd have to ask for double to cover the cost of submission as things are. Maybe returning the fee would be an alternative and in that case the fee could probably be raised quite a lot to avoid spamming. The quadratic voting system someone posted about a few weeks back is coming to mind for proposal submissions for some reason, no idea why yet though, maybe more coffee needed :/

 

[UdjinM6]

1% of total requested makes sense here too, maybe with a lower limit to put some sort of cap on spamming small proposals but I'd like to see a lot more small proposals and the fixed fee makes that difficult, that 5 Dash may be all someone is asking for in return for some artwork or a simple android app but they'd have to ask for double to cover the cost of submission as things are. Maybe returning the fee would be an alternative and in that case the fee could probably be raised quite a lot to avoid spamming. The quadratic voting system someone posted about a few weeks back is coming to mind for proposal submissions for some reason, no idea why yet though, maybe more coffee needed :/

As I said, I don't see how proportional fee could work in this case. Give me some numbers :tongue: Here are mine:
Let's take fernando 's proposal of 30 DASH reimbursement as an example. 1% of 30 DASH would be 0.3 DASH. If 30 DASH was the legit proposal (i.e. it was >= the lowest limit) than what would stop me from submitting 100 of similar proposals for only 100 x 0.3 = 30 DASH fees combined? We have 10-15 proposals now, imagine the list when someone just made this number 10x higher. Smart one would also give them names very similar to legit proposal to further confuse people....
Next let's see how we could vote them out. To bring one proposal down you need at least 10% of network "No"s i.e. ~350 votes. So to remove 100 of spam proposals you would need to broadcast (and store in MNs memory for some time) ~350 x 100 = ~35K votes. But how much is it? Well, all current proposals have only ~22k votes combined.
And that is what can be done for only 30 DASH. Imagine that someone is willing to spend 300 DASH (~$2k at current rate) - 1000 proposal and 350K votes to clean them all.
There is no way our current infrastructure could handle that many votes at a time. So in such extreme situation one possible solution would be to do nothing at all and let there be thousands of meaningless spam proposals instead of trying to fight them. Another one would be to coordinate people and vote spam proposals down one by one. But then, again, it's only 0.3 DASH (~$2) to bring another one online, so it's way to cheap to attack and it's way to expensive to defend (remember to count people's time here too).
Now compare that to 5 DASH (~$35) for a single proposal and 5000 DASH (~$35K) for 1000 proposals. You need to have really strong incentive to throw away that much imo.

 

[IronVape]

What if the cost stayed the same ( or even increesed ) but there were 2 vote thresholds instead of one? First threshold = return of submission fee. Second threshold = proposal approved. SPAM proposals would not even get the fee back.

 

[stan.distortion]

As I said, I don't see how proportional fee could work in this case. Give me some numbers :tongue: Here are mine:
Let's take fernando 's proposal of 30 DASH reimbursement as an example. 1% of 30 DASH would be 0.3 DASH. If 30 DASH was the legit proposal (i.e. it was >= the lowest limit) than what would stop me from submitting 100 of similar proposals for only 100 x 0.3 = 30 DASH fees combined? We have 10-15 proposals now, imagine the list when someone just made this number 10x higher. Smart one would also give them names very similar to legit proposal to further confuse people....
Next let's see how we could vote them out. To bring one proposal down you need at least 10% of network "No"s i.e. ~350 votes. So to remove 100 of spam proposals you would need to broadcast (and store in MNs memory for some time) ~350 x 100 = ~35K votes. But how much is it? Well, all current proposals have only ~22k votes combined.
And that is what can be done for only 30 DASH. Imagine that someone is willing to spend 300 DASH (~$2k at current rate) - 1000 proposal and 350K votes to clean them all.
There is no way our current infrastructure could handle that many votes at a time. So in such extreme situation one possible solution would be to do nothing at all and let there be thousands of meaningless spam proposals instead of trying to fight them. Another one would be to coordinate people and vote spam proposals down one by one. But then, again, it's only 0.3 DASH (~$2) to bring another one online, so it's way to cheap to attack and it's way to expensive to defend (remember to count people's time here too).
Now compare that to 5 DASH (~$35) for a single proposal and 5000 DASH (~$35K) for 1000 proposals. You need to have really strong incentive to throw away that much imo.

True, I've seen it take around 10 minutes for budget.dat to fully sync sometimes, 10x the number of votes and it wouldn't take long for it to be like syncing the full blockchain :/ Can the expired proposal data be flushed out? I thought it was already but the last couple of times I deleted budget.dat it resynced completely, it's nice to have that data but if it could be a cause of bloat...

Sorry, I'm going off track. A fixed fee and adjusting it manually seems clunky is all, certainly good enough for the short term and setting it via the voting mechanism could work long term but those small proposals are niggling at me, I get the impression they could have an awful lot to offer and a fixed fee doesn't give much incentive for them, they could attract a lot of talent but a bar to entry shuts out anyone who's just looking for a few beers in return for something small but significant. Maybe there's better ways of handling that, subdivision of budgets makes sense (development, PR, etc.) and subdividing further could go all the way down to tipbots but how to handle that? Comities? Idk, that sounds wrong but I can't think of anything better and a proven track record of successfully completing proposals could be a way of forming them :/ It sounds like something that would need just a small change to test the waters before further tweaking but I wouldn't be surprised if you pull another rabbit from the hat

EDIT: Just read Evans post on Aprils budget and the part on being able to adjust things like fee per kb through the voting mechanism got a little woot of joy Being able to adjust the proposal fee with that sounds sweet.

 

[TheDashGuy]

I just want the budget platform to be usable for smaller projects as well not just these several hundred-thousand Dash proposals and paying (in todays value) 35+ dollars to simply ask the network a question is a bit ridiculous... What if we're just funding something small like Juan needing paperwork/printables?

 

[Solarminer]

Maybe we need to start a MicroDash voting system. I was thinking you could require proposals that are small, only allow 1 proposal entered per hour, only need a few masternode votes(1%). Maybe this is all power by the MicroDash Masternodes, a division of the Micro-Economoy under the Dash World umbrella.

Ok back to reality. Maybe this is just a multisig wallet that a few willing masternodes approve sending of funds for projects based on a less formal webpage submittal.