We need to check that you know how protocol works.
Jk 
Final decision will come from OC and from left CC members anyway.
But what @johndavies24 suggested makes sense:
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I would like to share ‘my view point’ on returning the funds as well as the current talks that read a bit like ‘CC failure/disaster’.
First, regarding returning funds the the OC, I am rather neutral about it. I would argue to stay objective and be pragmatic, not overly expecting, emotional, or desillusioned.
When I put myself as candidate for the CC there were a number of reasons:
- I wanted to help facilitate community projects, providing funding, information and guidance where needed.
I think that as CC that is exactly what we did. We listened to request from the community and made sure funding was available for projects, feature and policies requested by the community. Does that mean every penny was well spend and that nothing went wrong? Absolutely not. But that was never the point of the CC or the community fund. To my understanding the aim of the fund and the CC was to help facilitate community projects where needed, not to drive them. Examples are the Grin miners and paying in Grin. In retrospect it was not the most effective ways to spend funds, but that does not matter, it was what the community was asking for at that time and as such it was spend in line with the objectives of the CC funds. Other examples are creating bounties for a Telegram bot - just yesterday I found someone already created a Grin Telegram & Keybase bot! Results are beside the point, there was a demand from the community and we made sure a bounty was created. Similar for funding for the Python cffi secp256k1-zkp wrapper. My point is, that it neither is or ever was is the job of the CC to make sure something is a success, whether that is the project at large or any small projects. It is the CC’s job to exist, listen, weight valid arguments and provide funding where needed, not leadership in the traditional meaning. Many things were experiments, like paying in Grin or having miners so we can do Grinonomics
- To take away pressure and community attention from developers and the OC.
I noticed in the past that the combination of development and governance for OC members and developers was basically a major energy drain leading to many good people leaving the project. Developers like to develop and discuss technology from a technocratic perspective and in general do not like to continuously be involved in politics and discussions that are often not supported by solid arguments, but by emotion, e.g. why no moon yet, why did you not develop XYZ just because I need it or because some random other crypto projects has done so? I think the existence of the CC took away some of the burden from developers so they had more space for development. Unfortunately, many developers had already left the house. At that time and @davidtavarez took a large share of dealing with complains, disgruntlement and other CC tasks, like the mining farm, that honestly are not and should not be the task of the CC and caused a burden and energy drain on normal governance and worse on the time David had for developing. Still regardless the lack of developers, I think we created some breathing room for the OC, developers and old community members so they had more time to go back to doing the things they liked to do instead of getting so drained they would leave the project like before.
- Create a fun and positive community experience
I think we had fun with meme contests and in general changed the forum and community to a more fun place to be part of and made the project more fun to contribute to. Before the CC there was a lot of toxicity. That does not mean there were no tough discussions or less fun times, but overal I think the existence of the CC helped to create a more positive and productive environment. At least, to me it felt that way 
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Regardless on whether we return the funds to the OC, add new members to the CC or do something like merging the councils to some extend, I think there will always be too high expectations, disappointments and in some cases, funds will be spend that in retrospect could have been better spend. I think that is all part of the game. Returning the funds would increase the already abundant funds of the OC but would not in any way that I can see lead to a positive change in governance.
I do not know the mind of the original donor, but I do not think he/she expected everything in the project to always go perfect or every penny to be spend perfectly. I think the main objective was to take away finance as an obstacle for the project, and the funds have succeeded in doing that. I love grassroots projects and free development but I think we should be pragmatic and realistic at the same time. Not everyone can afford to contribute freely. It is better to have multiple options (funded and free contributions), instead of only a single option (burning funds or giving them back to the donor and only free contributions).
This is in short my opinion/view of the topic. Again, I am rather neutral on whether we give back the funds to the OC or not, but I do not think it is realistic to expect that doing so would lead to any improvements since the OC already has enough funding and will most likely not ever go back to the way it was before, which IMO was still the best time of Grin governance.
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I don’t feel that the CC has been a failure, retrospectively, even though I think the outcome was middling. It was a mostly good group of people that acted on mostly good intentions, and any result where a group of community members is handed the keys to tens of bitcoins and does not simply run off with the money is a huge success in it’s own right.
But looking at prospectively at the future I just don’t see a lot of upside. We either have trustworthy members who are barely able to be present enough to sign transactions, or we potentially hand the keys over to a new group of replacements. I do not personally see an adequate pool of applicants who meet both the trust and activity requirements to even live up to the old CC.
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@Trinitron You are welcome to help fill the gap in the CC….
Two people should not be so hard to find, but yes it is a sacrifice of time and energy.
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Have you considered becoming a member of CC? You’ve been around long enough, seem to have a positive view of Grin and have had constructive responses from what I recall.
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Yes, I thought you @Trinitron or for example @trab might be good candidates, I did not discuss it with the others CC members, but I think they would agree.
Thank you guys. I have thought about it lightly.
I see a few problems with joining myself:
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I’m still uncertain about the idea of anonymous or semi anonymous users holding keys, which would make it somewhat hypocritical of me to join in my current capacity. One of the reasons I trust OC is the majority of them are publicly known under their real name.
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I am probably not well aligned with the stated intentions or common community desires of the CC. I would probably oppose nearly all fundings. Is that a helpful check on ambitions or just a malcontent spoiler candidacy? I don’t know.
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I am as limited as many of the other good council members have been. I’m active enough to check in frequently, but I don’t have a real active roll to take and I’m not a developer. I’ve always felt that members should be more than key holders, and I’m not sure that i could be more than that myself.
So I would think about it if it’s the best remaining option for me to help safeguard the fund, but I did make this post instead of a candidacy post because my ultimate preference would be to hand it back to OC.
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I would honestly even prefer if the funds when back to the OC keyholders under a seperate account set aside for CC directives, and a new CC was formed that merely filtered and interpreted requests for those funds. This would add slightly to OC’s tasks to sign transactions, but I would feel that we are a lot safer from catastrophe.
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There are also hybrid solutions there. My real identity is known to those in the CC as well as some of the OC. I use my pseudonym only as a small barrier for privacy and compartmentalisation. But perhaps for you it is different. I do not know if you want to stay 100% private. I do not think it is a big issue as long as the number of non private members is enough to ensure the threshold for the multisig can be met. That would be 5 members, which is more than enough for the threshold of 4 for the 4/6 multisig.
I do not think that is true. By my estimates your opinion more or less represent older crypto holders and grinners who focus more on simplicity and purity of the project. That is not the majority of community member but still represents a lot of people.
IMO, having developers on the council is a bit wastfull, e.g. @davidtavarez. Those who can develop should develop since we do not have that many of them. However, we do need at least some CC members with a sound technological understanding of grin, mimblewimble and crypto in general. To me it appears you fit that category, knowledgable, but perhaps not a programmer.
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You are the best CC member @Anynomous, please stay with us, long live Grin Community Council!
Will be cool to see @Trinitron joining CC as well.
We just need more people to review/approve code, @oryhp can not do everything alone
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I agree, trust can be much more of an issue in this case for obvious reasons. At the same time, I’ve met quite a few pseudonyms online I’d trust over someone I’m not really sure that shows a face.
That’s not necessarily bad per say. If you believe you have a good reason against a proposal, it should be voiced and heard. As long as you want to help the community use CC fund responsibly and towards positive requests, your opinion counts.
I still don’t think community members have to be proactive with projects and suggestions. At the moment, the community is really small and it’s hard to find trusted members with a lot of time and motivation right now. In my view, it’s more important that the council has members that are trusted because if the multisig assumption fails, it’s game over for the CC fund. Having knowledge of how Grin works isn’t a requirement, but we do have some resources to quickly get the basic ideas and if a question is asked on keybase, someone will answer. I’d love if we shared knowledge a bit more in chat room anyway, it brings better understanding and makes the community more active.
In general, I think having CC handle community funding requests unrelated to rust grin helps OC focus on core things. If we can find trustworthy members, I think this would be good. You all seem reasonable enough that if a new strategy of what requests to approve would be needed, I’d bet it would be possible to agree on something that you all believe would be an improvement.
You probably meant Yeastplume. He’s doing Atlas’ work right now. But you’re right that we do need to find more manpower on the code front.
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If the majority opinion is to retain a community funding mechanism/group. I would like to get more opinions on this idea. From current CC members, community, and eventually from OC about whether they’d accept a plan like this.
This would give the original CC members who are departing a safe exit from their keys, free from concern that they could be involved in the beginning of any sort of transfer or succesor mishap.
It would also give OC an inherent veto over CC spending, if the CC fund remains under their keys. To me this would be an explicit intention. I do want OC to have veto power.
I think I would consider this a prerequisite to my own potential participation in or support of any new council formation/election.
If this is all true, then how would taking a step backwards ever open a new path forward?
CC gave you a mechanism to obtain funding and continue working on Grin++, why would you want to close this door on other future developers who could also work on Grin++ or on other projects outside of the core codebase.
OC have only funded 1x dev over the past 2 years to continue maintaining the core codebase. It’s hard to see this changing anytime soon.
What upside do you see to the OC controlling all the funds? And how can you judge whether we have an adequate pool of new CC applicants, when we haven’t even asked for submissions yet?
You should know that fully doxed people rug projects all the time. It never offers the protection some people assume. Also, there’s no true Anon on the CC, it would be easy to dox any of us. I’d be open to doxing myself anyway.
If we’re going to maintain a community funding mech, then I don’t see the point in dissolving the CC. OC don’t have the resources to be signing txs for community funding requests- It would never be as simple as just signing a tx, they would then need to do their own due diligence on everything aswell, because, ultimately it would all fall back on them.
The better option imo would be for the OC to encourage more people to put their name forward for the CC.
It’s disappointing you’ve been active is the project this long, seen all the pitfalls, stress and issues that unfolded when OC had full control of everything and now want to re-centralize the project and return funds to a more depleted/ less motivated OC
^And this is not a stab at OC, but the reality is life happens, time is limited and people move on/ focus on other things and then sometimes go full circle.
It’s also disappointing that you’re now setting conditions just for your “participation”.
Who actually controls all the OC keys atm? It must be documented somewhere in the repo, but I had a quick look and can’t find it. I’m not sure if all key holders are active on the forum anymore? So you might be better posting this on Keybase or sending them DMs with reference to this post.
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This. Tired of the anon shaming. This project literally wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for countless anons.
Less risk of embezzlement.
I am familiar with the community. Unless a few select characters were to reappear out of the wood work I don’t think we have enough to fill 3 spots. Or is it 2? I’m still not clear on that. I mean we could fill them, but with people I trust with the keys? No.
Yes it’s true. But OC has a 5 year track record. Original CC has a track record too. New key holders don’t.
Yeah I worded that weird. I don’t mean dissolve. Remaining members remain. (edit: I would indeed support dissolving and ending, but this is a discussion in the context of the assumption that the majority of the community chooses against that)
Here’s the thing, I was mostly absent from after launch in 2019 until 2021. I missed all the drama and I can’t say for sure if I would’ve felt the same way about OC as so many people did, but given my minimalist predelictions and trust in OC I don’t think so. I was happy with Grin being under OC’s control, Igno said Grin is not a democracy.
You don’t need my participation. I see considerable risk ahead if CC is going to transfer keys and I am raising a warning about it with the only weight I have which is the subjective value that any of you give to my opinion as a simple community member. I will still be here as I usually am either way.
I am confident that at least one is, but this is not a question for them first it’s for CC and the community and then to them for their consideration if there is support for it.
We are searching for 2 new members, @mcm-mike stays on as keyholder but since he has less time, he searches for someone to represent him in day to day discussions.
I would like to point out that security of the keys which are so worried about is not so much an issue. We have a 4 out 6 multisig, meaning we need at least 4 honest members to not lose funds. Next to that, the people on the council are known, so any malicious attempts would require at least 3 members all of which can be doxed and hold accountable. Furthermore, there is no restriction on the number members the CC has. If I remember correctly they also reduced their multisig to 3/5 or 2/4.
In case of the CC, I would love to keep it at 4 out of 6, but we can always reduce to 3 out of 5 multisig
There are quite few people who are still on my mind and I have not even discussed with other CC members. I find it a pity your stick to the ‘return funds to the OC’, I would expect you to trust yourself as key-holder
Nor is it now. It is democratic in the sense that anyone can request funds or make proposals, but OC and CC are there to check if requests are sensible and in line with their individual objectives. I feel like you see the CC as being very different from the OC…IMO and experience the difference is rather small. I think there are many shared values and shared view points, as can be seen from recent discussions. The main difference is that their objectives differ slightly. The CC is more community oriented and open for experimental features that community asks for. And that is fine, because the CC was never meant to be a clone from the OC, but fill the gap where some community members (not me, not you apparently) felt they were not represented or listened to.
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Some of you made personal habit, punching CC all the time, ignoring or target diversion that OC is the responsible and driving force behind GRIN.
IF you are against the CC, it is obvious you want more centralization and shadow GRIN, keep it small and fit your agenda.
Yes, and I said before many times that I am very grateful for that.
Where/When did I say that I want to close this door? I never did instead I have been an advocate of funding others. I think FRs are a excellent mechanism to speed things up and push Grin’s development in general. I said in this very thread that I still maintain that one mistake of the OC was to just focus on Rust while ignoring the “pains” of the Community. How can someone come to the conclusion that “I want to close this door”? It’s nonsense, if that’s true, I would also be “closing the door” on myself, why would I want to “close the door” of being funded to myself? I don’t understand.
This is one of the things I am very tired of. It is impossible to have a productive conversation because everything becomes about expressing oneself in a way that is contrary to the other for the simple fact of being contrary. It is so childish, unproductive, a total waste of time and leads to nothing. Look, I don’t think @Trinitron likes me and he is not my favorite person either. The guy had expressed before that he is against of funding me and critics my work all the time! it’s no secret, but I’m not going to crash my keyword with my head because I see myself agreeing with him. I honestly think @Trinitron is mostly right this time, and I choose to focus on that rather than the disagreements, have the conversation and move on with my life. Simple.
Yes, I agree and I think that is not good for Grin.
I don’t think the main problem is to find trustworthy members to “hold the keys”, although I think it is a problem, the main problem is this 
And I stated:
And even if one does not want to or not, the “Community” expects an active role from at least the majority of the members of the Community Council. I myself believe that, under the current conditions, the members of a Community Council should have an active role, otherwise we are in a worse position than before, which is what is currently happening. The community is so small and so unproactive that maintaining an apathetic attitude is in fact a misstep. I will never “tell” or “force” anyone to do something they are not willing or want to do. I respect their decisions as much as I expect people to respect mine, I have no beef, and that’s why I preferred to step down.
Correct. This is something that people overlook time and time again… It should be clear in everybody’s mind that: Grin should never be a democracy. This is another reason why, under current conditions, the OC is the most appropriate entity to have the final say on the allocation of the curse, I mean funds.
A Community Council should always listen to the Users, Miners, Exchanges and Enthusiasts. A Community Council should drive the solutions to the Community’s challenges, and based on those challenges a Community Council could use the mechanisms of Funding Requests and Bounties. So far so good, but these activities require an active role. The “anyone could do it” is not working and will never work, unless the AI takes over or you create a DAO and write some smart contracts, and good luck with that in a Community of no more than probably 2 fully active developers. But I digress. My point is that the conditions are not in place for a passive Community Council to function, this is becoming increasingly clear.
As for the Funding Requests is even worse. I understand why one might want to disassociate oneself from the responsibility of approving or rejecting a request. That being said… not all opinions should carry the same weight when making a decision. A Community Council must, of course, listen to all opinions to have a overall understanding of the Community’s sentiment, but the final word must not be spoken by people who have little or no knowledge of the subject.
Once the Lenberg asked me something like this: “would you fund a person who is not able of defending his work?” and the clear answer is: no. But now the conditions are completely different. Before one had to defend oneself in front of a group of technicians, today, as we are talking about a “Community Council” a developer has to argue with people who can’t even read your code, have no experience building anything, have no knowledge of how things work, don’t understand the development process, can’t review your code, and/or don’t even use your software. Now, add the tribalists to that equation as well, people that are against you or against what you do just because. Why do these people have to say at the time of making a decision? But more importantly, why would a developer open a Funding Request or take a Bounty? Let me answer: no one will. The market is flooded with coins/tokens that can be made without having to go through that circus. The few people writing code right now for Grin are people who really believe in Grin, and what is the payback? The most unpleasant experience in the crypto scene. Good luck attracting new collaborators or retaining the little few of them, you’re going to need a lot of it.
If the Community Council is only a “key holder” there would be no difference in returning the funds to the OC, is that simple.
My profile on the forum will show you as one of my most liked posters, as evidence of our past agreements.
We are as able to agree as disagree, we would get along fine in person, and we don’t really know each other as a person so it’s not that personal. I think we are on the same page about those things.
To take this from another angle, I think the responsibility of holding the keys has itself causes some of problematic key holding attitude that comes out of the CC.
Since it is a great responsibility it gives a false sense of purpose, like a ceremonial robe that excuses all else as long as one is fulfilling this ultimate duty.
Without that there would be a naked understanding that the only possible role for a council member to fulfill is to be present and engaged.
I have no disagreement with mike and I know that his plan is proposed out of genuine good intentions but I think it actually only adds to the problem. Key holding members, deputized members, original members, keyless members… We would need a funding request just for someone to start recording the complexity of all this bureaucracy.
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