The Future of Decentralized Voices — Our Plan to Retune DV

Any kind of increased activity that can be linked to a product or service.
It could be more TVL, more transactions, more parachains, more buzz.

We need the buzz since a lot of crypto is still in this narrative mindset (making noise in the hope that someone will remember them when they invest some $).

We also need activities/users to create real value that is not purely buzz. One day the buzz will fade. Sure there are a few years ahead before it happens but it will happen.

A cloud is a low margin business and that’s far away from “get rich quick”. We need a lot of activity to make it relevant. Polkadot can scale fairly well so lets fill the capacity.

2 Likes

[quote=“sourabhniyogi, post:19, topic:13332, full:true”]

The Foundation v.s. Parity may have to be revisited but for now I have not observed this setup to be an issue in itself. The strategy is an issue, the structure just implement it.

Various reasons:

  1. The Parity budget is much smaller than the OpenGov budget you can vote against.
  2. It is not clear that the ability to vote on 100m$/y did yield significant results.
  3. Parity mostly build protocols (there is no comm, marketing or anything non tech left at Parity). On the protocol, most of the discussions are open either on GH, this forum or the fellowship. There is no hidden agenda.
  4. Having a budget that does not depend on OpenGov is important for long term investment: you cannot build a protocol in 6 months and you need sustain financing for that. It is complicated enough that I do not want to have financing issues on top.
  5. Why not start by contributing to the strategy and explain to us what to do? not some vague idea that someone should do something? Since we are the dev company, which features do you think would help us win more users?
  6. We are listening to both our parachains teams and people feedback.
    I am sure I am forgetting a long list of other reasons.

Zero transparency is incorrect. You get roadmaps, comms and updates all the time. I can publish the 25Q3 OKR if you want (no surprises there: finishing the Hub, improve security and reliability, PDP, Polkadot app, etc).

Fully agree on the other parts.

I believe we already have fixed Parity:

  • We invest money on a small number of projects that we believe can make a difference. And I agree that with power comes accountability. But for now, we do not have the power to make customers happy for example. This power is spread across multiple actors and make us collectively slow and inefficient. If a customer want new features, a new bridge and an aml solution, then the customer needs to make a deal with Parity, another one with a bridge company and convince OpenGov to finance an AML company all of that under time constraint since time to market matters.
  • Senior dev and leaders are highly incentivise with locked dots. We all have a vested interest in getting the ship in the correct direction.
  • The potential reward should also go both way (up and down).

Open question: are you pushing for more centralisation? more control and more accountability in one place or do you still think that the decentralize funding system will yield a different strategy and that we should wait?

My PoV is that people want decentralisation without control since it is comfortable. And when it is not working they do some W3F/Parity bashing. Fair up to a point. Think also about doing some introspection. Is OpenGov really trying to make it work with pink goodies, football and F1 events, etc? Upfront payment, incredible amount for small teams, zero data driven approaches? I believe the decentralized model can work if people are also talented, accountable and driven.

[…]

My leads, my boss and me are clearly advocating for a change. We are only deciders on part of the tech scope. That make us accountable for this part of the tech stack but not for everything. We are frustrated with the current state of things and we are working on a better plan. We do not control the timelines.

[…]

The fundamental problem we have is that the only way to take tokens out of circulation is through the acquisition of core time. With recent conversations around the price of core time it’s clear that with core time alone it will never be possible even with scaling to take a sufficient number of dot off the market. Since gossip doesn’t cleanly scale and doubling the number of validators more than doubles the bandwidth requirement, even with improvements, doesn’t allow for a sufficient number of cores to be created that it would allow a sufficient number of dot to be removed from circulation.

Even with 1000 cores, each core needs to fetch 8,000 DOT/month for the network just to break even. To hit the 200 dot/month mark which if my understanding is correct is the first public “valuation” of a core. To offset the required number of dot we would need over 40,000 cores consumed which is at least 3500 12 core parachains.

Alright, let’s just put aside any technical issues for a second and just say that was all possible. To get there, the treasury is completely inadequate. We need to bootstrap with additional sources of revenue for treasury. These would most obviously come in the form of market places with fees where the fellowship would build and maintain them and they would allow providers and consumers to exchange a variety of products / services.

If you want get rich quick we need to pronto use a 12 core chain to launch a casino with on-chain slot machines. The online gaming industry is massive and if polkadot could acquire a small fraction of that while providing similar or better experience with similar or better odds being provably fair an auditable would absolutely destroy the other online casinos.

The problem I have is, when I role play from the customer perspective.

So, when I look at a service like Akash, the only reason to use it is because you can get a GPU, storage, etc there for cheaper than you can get anywhere else. Instinctively, you ask, should I trust this? What if the rando provider steals my IP? The same is true for every market place solution including storage. Even if the storage is encrypted with the user’s key so no one can see it, what about the software? They have to be coaxed on board.

The only business I’ve found where the customer would prefer the on-chain solution over the off chain solution is a casino. The customer knows they’re already gaming on a casino that can legally cheat them because the company is registered in curacao or timbuktu or similar. There are mass amounts of forums, reddit threads, etc, all declaring the game providers scams, the websites themselves scams, etc. Satoshi dice never had those problems. It is the only business I’ve found where the customer would not instinctively or innately distrust the on-chain solution vs the off-chain solution.

If you want viral, if you want buzz, 12 core on-chain slots. But only the most pragmatic in the community would support it, IMO.

But maybe it’s just a lack of creativity on my part. Regardless, without a fee going to treasury or revenue going to treasury the only possible value can be core time demand. It’s why it’s critical for the treasury itself to fund and build these alternate sources of revenue that are directly marketable.

I believe we already have fixed Parity:

You mentioned that only the tech side is left. Has the tech side not ran the inflows vs outflows numbers yet? If so, what could make them believe that at least equilibrium is possible?

What I noticed from those leaving parity is that they lacked understanding of how to use the chain and seemingly have never used it, considered who customers were, or what the product was.

You also mentioned a lack of ideas. Let me explain to you what having an idea as a community member is like. Either the idea is internal or external to either w3f or parity.

The opengov route is a bit easier – There are kind of 2 ways to do this… The easy way and the hard way. Hardway) you spend about 3 months coming up with a really good proposal and framework that no one will read. Then people superficially vote on it when they lack any comprehension at all (polkadot #1591). If you’re not lucky enough to know a large bag holder with sense – Then you go back and rewrite it a bit or maybe bring a grifter or 2 on board who have a few votes in a few DVs, then you get it approved. Easyway) Talk to enough people so that you understand what is important to them and how they look at things / think about things. Once you’ve interacted with enough people you wait for certain DVs to be elected and then you toss in a half ass proposal.

The W3F/Parity route – Spend 6 months setting up meetings with people, making alternate documents / plans to their own, trying to explain to them that they’re wrong or not doing something correctly, then try to dark gov it so you go to an event to try to get face to face with certain people who are inevitably hiding in the green room because 100 other people are thinking the same thing. Then eventually, if your idea is good enough someone will half ass it into a formal plan they use to avoid being fired.

I can’t even begin to tell you how many hours I’ve wasted doing people’s jobs for them.

Someone needs to start a website with the ratio of solo chains to para chains. That is the ecosystem fail metric.