The potato of "Havoc in Heaven" said: "I believe in Code is Law"

Since 2020 @mashed green peppers with potatoes issued its first article in Matt City, I have witnessed many debates and even quarrels in the community . Until January 2022, he has also been at the center of the bombardment debate, bringing together rational and emotional disputes in the community.

After more than half a year, I contacted Tudou privately, trying to re-clarify what happened at that time and what enlightenment it can bring us. Are community quarrels really inevitable?

start from scratch

First, the background of the debate at the time is explained. If you are familiar with this information, you can skip to the next paragraph.

After Proposal 11, LikeCoin blockchain supports up to 50 active validators, which means that validators hold, plus the number of LikeCoins entrusted, must enter the top 50, which is called "active" validators. Validator revenue.

In order to encourage more people to serve as validators, Proposal 20 establishes the "Community Delegation Committee (hereinafter referred to as CDC)", which is responsible for managing a public fund in the community pool, which can be delegated to stakeholders in the community. Contributing validators are manually reviewed by a team of seven.

For many new validators who do not have much initial funds, this "community entrustment" fund can not only increase revenue, but most importantly, help them enter the top 50 rankings, so that there will be a return on revenue and pay node operating costs.

The problem is that "contributing to the community" is a subjective qualitative standard. As of the time of writing, the " community commission " document has the following approval criteria:

Community Fund Approval Committee Review (but not limited to):
1. Is the validator node always online?
2. Whether the validator is active in the development of LikeCoin on Discord and has enough community recognition.
3. Have validators advertised LikeCoin on the website or other channels and communicated with their delegators/stakeholders.
4. Whether the commission setting of the validator is adjusted according to the minimum commission agreed by the community, and whether it is reasonable.
5. Whether the validator has participated in the proposal voting.
6. Do validators benefit the community as they write in #Validator Intro When validators are truly committed to public affairs, they will naturally be recognized by the community. A validator can be delegated or renewed by the community when it obtains five or more consents from the committee ( 5 Aye ) or more.

Tudou applied to the CDC for two community fund commissions, both of which were rejected, and published "Bombarding the LikeCoin Community Commission and Community Commission Reform ", criticizing the CDC's system. This article pointed out the problem of "CDC members who are also validators but did not avoid voting", as well as the system flaws that may be evil, but because of the fierce wording, it caused a defamation controversy.

Four days after the article was published, Tudou proposed Motion 32 to dissolve the CDC, and after the LikeCoin promoter Gao Reconstruction took the initiative to put in the mortgage funds , he entered the voting process, and finally ended with:

Yes: 31.48%
No: 53.53%
Veto: 0.17% (strongly disagree)
Abstain: 14.83% (abstain)

The motion was rejected, and it is the only one so far that has been rejected due to "more negative votes than yes".

half a year later

For Tudou, the bombardment article was published at the time, and the most unexpected thing for him was that he met Welike because of this.

Welike is a group that operates news websites and promotes blockchain knowledge, etc., but the most well-known should be the "LikeCoin zero-commission validator", and thus become a "mysterious whale" (meaning a person with huge funds).

In the LikeCoin world, you can entrust funds to the validator and share the profit of the validator. The validator usually charges a portion of the commission as a commission. After all, server resources cost a lot. And zero commission means that the verifier does not charge a commission, so it can maximize the delegator's income, and Welike has won a very high share of the commissioned funds.

However, in the LikeCoin world, validators are " banks and legislators ", and the validators with higher entrusted funds have higher voting rights, which leads to the risk of centralized power of giant whales (although LikeCoin implements the "Liquid Democracy", delegators can bypass validators to vote directly).

Tudou said that Welike's views are very consistent with him, and he does not like the CDC's community fund application and renewal system. I checked Welike's voting records, and not only voted Yes on the motion 32 of Tudou's proposal to dissolve the CDC, but also on the earlier motion 20 of the establishment of the CDC, and even "the only validator who did not vote Yes" (who voted Abstain), his position very clear.

Why do Tudou and Welike oppose CDC's system of reviewing community fund mandates?

Code is Law

Tudou believes that the LikeCoin DAO relies on "trusting" the CDC seven-member team. The existing loose system is prone to drawbacks, and the fact that CDC members "vote for themselves" without avoiding conflicts of interest; his ideal DAO It is in line with the "trustless" spirit of blockchain.

Potato:

Many of the current LikeCoin solutions are based on trust. And DAO has a feature that it can be executed without trust. So LikeCoin DAO does not solve the trustless problem of blockchain.

Traditional transactions are secured by assets of large institutions, government credibility, state-authorized banks, etc., and the registration of banks and stock markets is a real-name system. One of the features of blockchain is anonymity and no identity authentication. So I think the blockchain era needs to rely on the establishment of a "trustless" background system to solve secure transactions in an anonymous environment without worrying about property loss.

What's more, when property is damaged, it is generally based on the real-name system of bank registration to investigate criminal and civil liability or something. And even with the real-name system, there is still running away, failing to recover the evaded money, and the like. When it comes to anonymity, tracing losses is almost impossible.

This reminds me of the previous issue of the Cosmos ecosystem with Juno Motion 16 passing the confiscation of whale assets , a tyranny of the majority. In addition, the loss of crypto assets is usually only a personal error or stolen by hackers.

"Trustlessness" is indeed one of the important core values of the past blockchain revolution. The most well-known belief is "code is law". Everything operates automatically according to the open code without any additional Trust others.

Potato:

I am more inclined to code is law. Just like traditional laws can be modified, we can improve DAO by upgrading code. Similar to the upgrade product of Web2 Coder, more DAO applications can be realized by upgrading the code. Web2 products have a problem, that is, the protection of user privacy, so there should be new applications in the Web3 era to solve Web2 problems such as data collection.

I don't think that the code is law completely free economic model will completely replace the rule-making by an institution in the Web3 era. Similar to the e-commerce that appeared in the Web2 era, SNS (Social Network Service) provides people with New shopping and online interaction models, but traditional brick-and-mortar stores, books, etc. still cannot be replaced. Therefore, I hope that code is law can provide users with a new application experience in Web3, and solve some problems of Web2, such as network identity, monopoly of large institutions and the like.

In addition, code is law basically solves the problem of manpower to some extent, so that people no longer do repetitive things (such as the monthly manual review by CDC judges), which is similar to the concept of artificial intelligence machine learning.

Code is law is also rule of man, because code is also written by man. Why do we write such code and what problems do we need to solve (similar to Web2, why do we write code to develop this product)? These are all things that the human brain needs to think and discuss, but we leave the things to be done to the code to handle. If we have a better solution, we can upgrade by modifying the code, similar to the way the courts upgrade the system by modifying the constitution. That's a little bit of what I expect from Web3.

When Potato talks about these ideas ideally and rationally, it seems like a different person. But in the course of the conversation, he still expressed his dissatisfaction with the CDC from time to time, just like the situation when the artillery was fired six months ago.

Can Code is Law run a DAO?

Looking back at the founding period of Ethereum in 2016, the leading The DAO was used by hackers to steal a large amount of assets by exploiting contract loopholes, and finally the Ethereum community decided to "hard fork" to forcibly retrieve the hacker assets. Ethereum Classic, which insisted on "code is law", was unsustainable, and was attacked by 51% of the computing power from time to time.

It may be said that the members of the Ethereum community at the time believed that "the monetary system must serve the people" was more important than "code is law". This historic landmark event often makes me mistakenly believe that "code is law" is no longer accepted. So far, there are still many Web3 projects that have their assets hacked due to contract loopholes, but Ethereum has long stopped dealing with this kind of thing. Perhaps only The DAO's assets were "too big to be stolen".

I listened to a lot of external DAO participants on Matters Lab Discord a while ago to share their governance methods. There are indeed some DAOs that are quite "ruled by man". It is not easy to join that kind of DAO, and even requires the "governance of internal members". trust".

I think that the so-called organizational governance is usually both the rule of man and the rule of law. Ultimately, it is to ensure the "mutual trust and cooperation" of internal members, so that the organization can operate. From this point of view, the development model of LikeCoin DAO is based on the rule of man, supplemented by the rule of law. So in addition to complaining about the poor experience of the CDC application process, the more rooted question should be: Can Code is law operate a DAO?

Potato:

It takes time to test. It's still early days and everyone is trying to conceive. What the CDC is doing now can be regarded as an attempt, and it has also been recognized to a certain extent. For example, the vote (note: should refer to the motion 20 for the establishment of the CDC) was passed.

Until a better DAO paradigm emerges, we will continue to follow past experience. Because the establishment of an organization, the most important thing is to rely on the mutual trust of people. How can this be defined by code?

Even if we can clearly define the goals of the organization (such as the function that an app wants to achieve), write the smart contract of DAO to recruit engineers, and after the function development is completed, the smart contract will be accepted and paid, then I am afraid it is just cheap outsourcing form. For example, how should the quality of code be defined and written into a smart contract? In the end, it often depends on people to check.

After all, I still don't know if we can really use "trustless, cold rules" to gather crowds and operate effectively for a long time? For another example, can a community rely on a reward system to survive for a long time? But this seems to be the norm in the Web3 community in recent years.

Free Market and State Grants

Another problem pointed out by Tudou is about the system of "community fund delegation":

My point of view is that CDC's community delegation divides nodes into two camps: state-owned nodes and private nodes. State-owned nodes rely on government support, and node commissions are generally higher than private nodes.

When CDC uses "community contribution" to review community fund commissions, it can naturally use such criteria to attract node validators with the same values and get higher commissions.

But on the contrary, this makes the node validator very likely to rely too much on the commission of the community fund to be profitable. Since then, "state subsidies" may have intervened excessively in the free market.

In the LikeCoin document " Community Entrustment ", it is pointed out: "The Community Entrustment Fund Program is designed to support some newly joined validators who wish to contribute to the governance of the LikeCoin chain to provide start-up funds", which is indeed similar to the state subsidizing the development of early-stage industries. In addition, the "renewal" system can continuously monitor the community contribution performance of validators.

However, as a "start-up fund for newly joined validators", community delegation not only does not have an "exit" mechanism, but instead adds a "high community delegation" to obtain 1.5 times the delegation fund; this makes the "community delegation fund" essentially Become a "Community Contribution Reward".

Wouldn't it be nice to verify that people are all actively contributing together in the community? Let's observe another LikeCoin DAO phenomenon.

LikeCoin DAO Proposal Review

Looking back at the first 52 proposals that the LikeCoin DAO has completed ( reference source ):

• 47 entered the voting process
• 16 passed with 100% Yes, accounting for about 34% of all votes
• 38 passed with more than 99% Yes, accounting for about 81% of all votes
• 43 passed with more than 80% Yes, accounting for about 91% of all voting motions

There are only 3 motions with less than 80% Yes (in order of Yes voter turnout):

• 【Motion 20】75.76% Yes / 24.24% Abstain
  Propose new set of rules and structure of the Community Delegation Committee
• 【Motion 9】53.57% Yes / 46.43% No
  Delegate the like in the ecological pool
  
• [Motion 32] 31.48% Yes / 53.53% No / 0.17% Veto / 14.83% Abstain
  Proposal:Dismiss LikeCoin Community Delegation Committee

Among the 47 voting motions, only 2 have not been passed: one is motion 32 proposed by Tudou, and the other is motion 51 because the number of votes (39.02%) did not reach the legal threshold (40%) and was not passed. But the vote is 100% Yes.

With such a high percentage of Yes votes, I think there are two possibilities:

First, this kind of "democracy" is too inefficient. Almost every motion is passed by applause, which means it is inefficient. Haseeb Qureshi, co-founder of cryptocurrency investment fund Dragonfly, even wrote that “ Blockchains should not be democracies ”:

Businesses are not democracies, militaries are not democracies, nonprofits are not democracies, and open-source software projects are not democracies. There are good reasons for this.

However, recently LikeCoin DAO established Tech Subdao through Motion 36 and Marketing Subdao through Motion 38, which is similar to the "administrative" agency in the separation of powers, and the "legislative" motion to review the budget is a reasonable step.

Second, the homogeneity of this community is too high. As @leafwind pointed out in " Reason for Abstention on Motion 32 ":

After all, the worst state is not that someone raises an objection, but that there is no objection at all.

Potato was rejected in motion 32, but still got 31.48% Yes and a rare high ratio of 14.83% Abstain. Then, the proposal to be included in the "public node" was quickly proposed34, but it failed to trigger community discussions. In the end, no one else made a deposit, and the voting process was not possible due to insufficient deposit.

Tudou said that after that, several seniors "all reminded me that time is precious, and it's boring to toss too much."

Since then, the "opposition" force of LikeCoin DAO has almost disappeared. Of the 19 votes voted on after that, 17 received more than 99% Yes.

If then...

However, during the period of promoting Motion 32, Tudou's remarks were mostly based on the issue of "presumption of guilt", which caused disputes in the community. In a discussion on the LikeCoin Discord at the time, leafwind pointed to the potato issue more directly:

You can say "this voting mechanism cannot be trusted, and there are flaws that may operate voting", but saying "votes are fake" means that all of us who are entrusted by CDC did not vote responsibly, which is equivalent to firing a map to accuse a group of validators , if so, please provide evidence.

In fact, your remarks have been repeated over and over for a while. You seem to have reasonable doubts, and then you insist on the guilt without evidence. I support your reasonable doubts every time, but this repetition is completely useless for discussion. help.

For this reason, I said to Tudou: "It is not easy to gather the forces of the opposition. It is a pity that this energy failed to continue to trigger subsequent reforms; the other part may be that the motion was unconvincing and unconvincing because you published a document or proposal in a hurry at the time. Let people who feel innocent suffer the disaster of the fish pond." Would it have been more meaningful and effective if the promotion of the motion could have been handled more properly at that time?

Potato only responded indifferently: "Maybe."

(Special thanks to @reading pen farming for assisting in editing)

Appendix: LikeCoin DAO's Top 52 Proposals Voting Yes

1: 100.00%
2: 100.00%
3: 100.00%
4: 81.02%
5: 100.00%
7: 100.00%
8: 100.00%
9: 53.57%
11: 100.00%
12: 100.00%
15: 100.00%
16: 99.82%
17: 100.00%
18: 99.99%
19: 100.00%
20: 75.76%
21: 99.99%
22: 100.00%
23: 86.58%
24: 100.00%
25: 100.00%
26: 99.98%
27: 100.00%
28: 86.24%
29: 100.00%
30: 99.99%
31: 99.99%
32: 31.48%
33: 99.99%
35: 99.98%
36: 99.97%
37: 99.97%
38: 99.94%
39: 99.96%
40: 99.98%
41: 99.95%
42: 99.97%
43: 99.97%
44: 97.01%
45: 99.84%
46: 99.98%
47: 99.32%
48: 99.99%
49: 97.78%
50: 99.99%
51: 100.00% (failed)
52: 99.82%