Dismantling the core team and governance structure

Sure it is a possibility and sorry I probably missed the cititations were the donators accepted that their donations where used for personal purposes of core members. Please quote the phrases from the donators that back such a statement.

But again… exit scam. That is how it would be remembered.

Please don’t agree to disagree. It sounds like you’ve had this discussion before, but I haven’t seen it and I’m very interested in it.

@tromp, why is that wishful thinking on his part?

The market does not tell you its reasoning.

Off-topic comment about price discovery and layer 2

Grin needs to have a price discovery mechanism based on Dex instead of relying on Cex. And Grin needs more technical exploration on layer 2.


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Off-topic response to previous comment

If there only were trustworthy DEX that are truly private, decentralized and mainstream to begin with…


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I probably missed the cititations

@bluimes you might find this thread informative Donation to the Grin General Fund - Nov 11

Let’s stop with the discussions about donor intentions in this thread now, unless it directly relates to a concrete proposal for a change. Those who want to discuss further are directed to open a new thread for this.

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This thread is about:

How could we best go about dismantling the core team and the governance structure, what would we then replace it with, and how would this be an improvement to the status quo?

I see some topics above that are to some degree related, but not immediately on topic, such as:

  • What is the reason behind the lack of engagement and new contributions?
  • What are the most important design priorities of Grin?
  • What does the market value?
  • What’s the purpose of Grin?
  • What were the true intentions of the anonymous donors?

While many of these are interesting topics and deserve to be discussed further, I’d like to keep this thread from derailing. I urge you to open up new topics on the forum for them.

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Attacks on Grin’s governance. Governance is a massive security risk for any blockchain project. Example of possible attacks:

  • Sibyl, bribing, or collusion attacks on any kind of voting or signalling by community.
  • Attempts to gain control of mu-sig wallet.
  • Subversion of decision making process in order to gain unduly influence for personal gain, for example through changing emission, pow, and so forth.

it might be important to understand why there’s such limited participation, and whether this is something we can improve upon as a result of any governance changes that may take place.

To explain my intention a bit better, I listed the lack of participation as something that should be taken as a given, to avoid proposals for some new system that would rely on a large and active community of contributors, as this is unfortunately not realistic today.

It would be great to see proposals that can lead to improved engagement and contributions, perhaps this could be motivated as part of the actual proposal itself.

What makes you say this? I’m one of the largest critics of our current governance structure, and money has only ever been a secondary concern for me

Because to me, “what do we do with the mu-sig?” is the hardest question to answer, and I can see how it can become infected.

Adding to this, there’s been a lot of back and forths about

All of the above, relates to money, and the fact that the core team has control of some, which means we need to make (sometimes tough, sometimes easy) spending decisions. If we had no money, there would be no decisions to make, and less contention as a result.

The question “who decides what gets merged in /grin and /grin-wallet” seems to be way less contentious, and has easy solutions if it’s not working as it should: Developers can fork the repos or write their own implementation from scratch.

The question “who decides what Grin’s consensus rules should be?” is more complicated, but still much easier to reason about (at least right now) than Bitcoin - there is a process in which to propose and introduce consensus changes. And given that there’s been some clear design decisions and directives set out very early in the project’s life cycle (like emission, minimalism, scalability), there is definitely some kind of “checklist” for how we can reach agreement amongst ourselves for that.

Furthermore, regardless of the outcome of this thread, there are larger questions that we will need to figure out at some point. Right now there are two Grin implementations. What happens when there’s three, or four, or five? How do we reach agreement amongst implementations about the right rules, when to make changes, and how to do so? The current governance model doesn’t really account for this, there is no governance process between implementations.

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I am aware of that post. Particularly this part:

I would like to see more separation of power. I see three powers here:

  1. Power of the Purse (control of the grin donation funds)
  2. Power of the Repo (control of what gets merged in the mimblewimble repos)
  3. Power of Direction (control of what projects / features will be developed)

I vote that no person can hold more than one of those powers at a time.

The members of “Direction” decide which projects/features to work on.
The members of “Purse” decide which of those to fund
The members of “Repo” decide when something is ready to merge.

A 4th power could exist in the community where direction and funding can be bypassed by somebody not seeking funding.

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Can’t see a strong difference between those 3 powers.

“Direction” needs money to fund development, so has no real power unless developers work for free. But if developers work for free, they’ll probably work only on what they want/like and not what the “Direction” wants.

“Repo” is defintely not a power as implementations and repositories are infinitely forkable. If “Repo” wants to forbid merging of a “Direction” decided code development, “Direction” will probably just fork the code to a new repository. Same if “Repo” merges code not decided/validated by “Direction”.

“Purse” might be a power, as money can buy anything. But “Purse” should definitely be subordinated to “Direction” unless we want to subsidized projects totally unrelated to Grin. And that will definitely scare donors away.

So we are left with “Direction” power only.

What could be done is ask for donations once projects have been validated by the “Direction” power.

But it could slow down development and requires donors to have some good technical understanding.

I like this proposal, very actionable and brings immediate progress. I’m not sure we can separate #2 and #3 though.

I do believe it’d be beneficial to reduce power centralization by separating some of the fund control from those who also lead the general direction of the project. But it would have to be done very safely, there’s a lot of trust required for that.

I actually think the core team should be disbanded. The only reason for it to exist is for distribution of donation funds, and the multisig controllers should be labelled differently. All other decisions should be made by rough community and dev consensus, similar to bitcoin.

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How do you quantify what the market indicates?

I think some are aiming to some kind of “Bitcoin Foundation” / “Bitcoin Core” separation.

We all know how it ended.

Why would it work better for Grin? Real question.

I don’t think there should be any foundation or core team.

Also I’m not familiar with the details of that story, would love to hear it.

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It ended with the dissolution of the foundation. A victory, if you ask me.

Agree with David that we need to look more broadly what has gotten us here. Is there consensus that restructuring governance will broadly make things better for Grin…? Meaning, do we expect more volunteer developers to take active part…? I’d think that’s the first order of business - how do we attract volunteer developers to the project. Might be by prioritizing and solving (w/ existing resources) the big, visible problems or could be through more public association with projects like LTC. A ‘better bitcoin’ as a tagline itself will put off bitcoin developer base in wanting to contribute to Grin. Need 3 efforts in parallel - (1) solve big visible technical challenges (2) consider allocating resources to increase awareness of Grin through association (3) a better governance structure to help support 1 and 2.

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Here’s my concrete proposal:

  • Dismantle “official” core team and remove it from grin.mw/governance.
  • Form a new council of 5 members which control the multisig keys for the fund. The current core team picks them; They must be very trusted people but preferably not core developers (note the distinction between core team and core developers).
  • Going forward, major decisions (accepting RFCs and funding requests) are made by consensus of community members and contributors. No rules are set for veto power. The decision process is based upon a technical and social hierarchy that is unclear to outsiders, where regular contributors and long-time users hold more social & technical significance and therefore their voice is more appreciated.

This may sound quite radical but in fact it will hardly be felt unless there’s a truly major division, in which case a hardfork split will occur.

All for the sake of making Grin feel more open.

Make Alice Great Again.

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One drawback, and it was pointed out by some members of the core team before, is that it makes sense that the owners of the multi-sigs are unknown, for their security, and the security of the funds.

I’m sorry, is there something wrong with the current meritocracy? I think the current devs are doing more than a great job. Grin works, we get updates, there have been improvements to grin. So it seems like your asking, “How do we disassemble our awesome team of devs” to me. I think the answer is, we don’t. New devs can join if they want, if they don’t then they don’t. Just BLB (be like bitcoin).

At any given point you could say the dev team is centralized, because they only have so many devs. The only way they’d be truly centralized is if they didn’t allow other devs to join the project, ever.

The price curve looks like what i’d expect to see when the ratio of new buyers entering the market is = sellers. Relatively Flat.

The only thing i’d like to see is more community participation on this forum. There are too many lurkers!

Edit: I just wanted to add, there is some degree of trust we give to the devs for any given crypto project, and that’s ok. I, like the major donor, feel like grin is in the right hands.

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