[Phase 1] HIP #49 Change of Arbitrator

[santisiri]

@juanu

Esto es una falacia. La DAO tiene autonomia ya que es votada por los meembros (registrados humano). Kleros no forma parte de las decisiones tomadas por la DAO.

Coincido. Esta crisis comienza sin embargo con el statement de que los canales de chat en los que la comunidad invirtió su tiempo para ayudar a la gente y atender sus necesidades, fueron repentinamente declarados propiedad de la Coop. De ahí que ahora la DAO está buscando certezas respecto a que le pertenece y que no… creo que esto en sí es muy saludable para todos.

[juanu]

@santisiri

Coincido. Esta crisis comienza sin embargo con el statement de que los canales de chat en los que la comunidad invirtió su tiempo para ayudar a la gente y atender sus necesidades, fueron repentinamente declarados propiedad de la Coop. De ahí que ahora la DAO está buscando certezas respecto a que le pertenece y que no… creo que esto en sí es muy saludable para todos.

coincido también, pero es importante educar a quienes no tienen un completo entendimiento de los procesos de toma de decisiones y sus actores. Creo que es uno de los mayores problemas que tiene hoy la DAO.

Hay una gran mayoría de usuarios que tienen una visión positiva para el cambio, que apoyan esta HIP, pero no tienen un entendimiento pleno de como funciona todo internamente, por lo que votan o hacen afirmaciones que creen entender al 100%, cuando la realidad es otra.

Por esto hago hincapié en que para avanzar con esta HIP (la cual QUIERO apoyar) se requiere mucho trabajo de investigación y entendimiento, de mecánicas de incentivos y protocolos, no solo decir “si, nos vamos de Keros”.

La propuesta debe llegar con mejoras, tanto desde el lado tecnico de implementacion, como desde el lado pedagogico. Los miembros que votan deben aprender y entender que estan votando. No solo por que “si tiene sentido” , sino desde el lado de saber cual es el impacto.

[s-p-k-y.eth]

@jfdominguez.eth

The interests of Kleros DAO and Poh DAO are not 100% the same, they may have points of alignment, but while Kleros seeks to give value to the PNK and in case this is aligned with that objective, to value the UBI. Poh DAO seeks to give value and use to the UBI even when this may go against the value of the PNK.

There is a confusion about the separation of daos. PoH dao should work towards the secure and affordable running of PoH. UBI dao is working towards fair value and distribution of ubi. Kleros works towards the secure operation of the court and the value of their tokens. These are separate daos and there may be occasions where they are conflicting, can’t we imagine the pursuit of ubi value could also be in conflict with poh in the same way we imagine pnk to be?

We could even make another dao with another new token with an even fairer distribution without initial funding presales from democracy earth! Surely this would then be the best token for an independent court without external organisational pressures? But see, we start to fall into conspiratorial language, describing patriotic independent sovereignty than can never be satisfied.

There are conflicting pressures however we move and we should accept that. There is no purity we will find. We are inter-dependent and should rally around our shared goals and reliance on one another. Kleros court works fine imo. The idea of having backup processes in place and an ability to fork all aspects when needed could be useful.

But jumping straight into breaking connections and replacing the court under the guise of fairness (when unfairness hasn’t really been demonstrated), independence (when we just become dependant on something else), and ubi token(when we could launch any other token on top of poh and it could also have fair claim to this) seems misguided.

[santisiri]

I definitely don’t want Proof of Humanity DAO to break any ties with Kleros, I’m not interested in that at all and hopefully the fact that I voted in support of @clesaege in HIP 48 is a testament to that considering the fact that my vote alone with its delegations had the choice to condemn him.

I agree with @juanu that any change that implies using changeArbitrator (which is still a legitimate use of the smart contract) should be severely tested with deployed proof of concepts on testnets. I wouldn’t support this HIP moving forward without that as well. At the same time, there’s nothing wrong on proposing using this function and everyone in this community has a right to propose alternative uses of it.

As @s-p-k-y.eth says there’s much to gain from PoH, UBI and Kleros working together. But until this crisis, the boundaries between each project weren’t clear to many. This lengthy debate should help clarify those so we can move forward with a more clear understanding by the community as a whole on how things work and what is possible / not possible.

Again, I don’t view this as a bad situation but rather quite the contrary, something that will lead to a more solid project and community as a whole.

[s-p-k-y.eth]

@santisiri

Again, I don’t view this as a bad situation but rather quite the contrary, something that will lead to a more solid project and community as a whole.

Agreed! It’s exciting and energising when debate stirs up and people start to voice their thoughts.

Even though I don’t think this should happen I’m glad people are thinking about how it could happen and when it should happen. And making preparations and test to see what is possible. Having people ready and aware to fork is a very good thing. (I’m actually surprised we don’t see more community forks across the eth ecosystem, there’s a lot of cloned contracts but it’s rare things happen from within). As PoH gets more humans things will become more difficult and complex and opinionated. That’s great, it’s human.

This thread is very healthy and needed.

[clesaege]

@jfdominguez.eth

@clesaege

PoH paid a total of 10 000$ to jurors, that is less than 1$ per registration. Putting UBI as a staking token will not significantly increase UBI price.

That amount was paid by individual people, not by Poh. In your view is like the registrant´s errors paid for the whole registry. Maybe I misexpressed myself, the motivation is not UBI price, is to have a diverse registry, also baing the first experience in crypto for people who needs help and not risking big amounts on jurors.

Sure, in the current design, individuals who are rejected pays for the security of the registry (maintaining a healthy challenger ecosystem).
Actually when we started studying systems like TCR, we were scarred that there wouldn’t be enough rejections to incentivize a challenger ecosystem and with the guys of Truebit studied the concept of forced errors:
Put wrong submissions on purpose in order to incentivize a challenger ecosystem. Note that in the context of PoH it would require some fees from participants even when submissions are accepted.

However we found out that we didn’t even need forced errors, as people being humans made errors without even being asked, so the challenger ecosystem ending up being funded without any forced error scheme.

We could discuss introducing a registration fee and forced errors while relaxing the policy strictness. But note that it would result in a higher average cost per user.

Note that none of this is dependent of the arbitrator.

@jfdominguez.eth

Maybe was an interpretation mistake, but calling “greedy” only because you don´t understand the motivation is one of the things that make me think we are not really aligned. If you think this is about greed or money you are not listening enough to the community.

A “greedy fork” is a fork where someone replace one token with his own. That is the term we used when discussing the Aragon fork and it is made to contrast with regular forks (like ETH with ETC, BTC with BCH or Kleros forks described in the whitepaper).

@jfdominguez.eth

As I mentioned in the first point, I believe that Kleros has as its objective the valorization of the PNK

So if someone wants to put the UBI token it’s not for the price, but if someone wants to keep PNK (which funded the project) it’s because of wanting to increase its price. I don’t get this double standard.

@jfdominguez.eth

Again, this money is not being paid by PoH is being paid by humans trying to register in a registry

Humans (or fake humans who will fail registration) pays Proof Of Humanity which in turn pays jurors (20%) and challengers (80%).
I understand that people do not like much losing money, but it is necessary for someone to pay for the challenger ecosystem. Otherwise people would attack it and PoH would be useless. Seeing that some large scale farming has gone undetected for sometime, I’m not even sure that the challenger ecosystem is enough incentivized.
Even people who fail their first registration ends up net positive just with the UBI they get (180$ over the 2 years registration period while the lost deposit is 130$). Note that gas fees may change that, but with V2, gas fees should become negligible (and deposits would also lower).
A way to increase the net profit of registered humans would be to increase what is given to registered humans like having them getting more airdrops.
Lowering security would make the registry less attractive, thus less likely to be used to receive airdrops.

@jfdominguez.eth

@clesaege

That isn’t true, using a separate token will prevent mutualization of the security. The UBI marketcap is extremely low (0.5M) and attacks on it would be way easier than attacks on PNK.

Answering FUD question.

This isn’t FUD. This is discussing security concerns and arguing that PoH currently benefits from mutualized economic security and removing that would make it less secure.

[fnanni]

@jfdominguez.eth

What we are talking about is to have the Arbitrator and Governor full aligned to Poh DAO, we are not talking about one case or one court neither about @ludovico wills.

“Whoever controls the courts, controls the state”. Aristotle. This is how Kleros white paper introduction starts. Personally I want a court controlled by diverse humans with alligned interesses and not by 10-15 wallets with some other motivations.

I wish a inclusive register where attaks and mistakes are not trated as the same, and the answer “you allways can change the rules” is what started this HIP.

My hypothesis is that the UBI courts will still be “plutocratic”, fewer than you think will participate (because of min stake and interest for example), there will be whales in the court, total stake is going to be low in comparison to Kleros and thus it will be more attackable, you will still see rulings you don’t like, you will find yourself saying “you can always change the rules or stake” to people mad about a ruling and the courts will still have some problems which Kleros has (but is improving for Kleros v2). It seems to me that what you expressed in your replies is mostly wishful thinking. Could you answer the 4 questions I made in my last reply?

On the other hand, PoH has a problem with farmers. Do you think farmers’ incentives are aligned with your interests? Do you worry about farmers controlling the courts? Today it seems that it takes around 1k humans to do a 51% governance attack to PoH. Let’s say an influencer with 1M followers decides to attempt to break PoH and the UBI courts by mobilizing their fans. Do you think this could be possible? What defenses have both systems against this?

[santisiri]

@fnanni

My hypothesis is that the UBI courts will still be “plutocratic”, fewer than you think will participate (because of min stake and interest for example), there will be whales in the court,

what happens if we use quadratic staking for the courts? this does not need to be a change on the arbitrator contract per se but possibly using a proxy token like UBIVOTE could achieve an effect that mitigates whales. or even a quadratic PNK token could be put in place.

[fnanni]

There are some technical challenges in making something like UBIVOTE compatible with KlerosLiquid. It’s doable of course, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Kleros v2 rolls out sooner than UBIVOTE based courts.

Quadratic PNK or quadratic UBI alone do not solve the issue as tokens can be split into many wallets. If you add the isRegistered() feature like UBIVOTE, that’s better protection against whales, but we will still have the problem of farmers, who might have greater incentives than the average registered human in staking. Even farming a few dozen profiles would make a big difference in your chances of getting drawn in the courts in comparison with honest humans.

My point is that people might be overestimating how decentralized UBI or UBIVOTE courts might be.

[fnanni]

I’m not so sure KlerosLiquid can be used with quadratic tokens without any modification. At a first sight I’d say probably not.

[santisiri]

@fnanni

we will still have the problem of farmers, who might have greater incentives than the average registered human in staking. Even farming a few dozen profiles would make a big difference in your chances of getting drawn in the courts in comparison with honest humans.

Agreed. Human farming should definitely be an area of concern with the development of the protocol… after all we are after sybil attacks.

I don’t agree with you though that there isn’t a market for UBI jurors. The users that have spent almost every day last year on all of the PoH channels are very much likely a market that shows plenty of potential in my view and can grow if you give it space.

@fnanni

I’m not so sure KlerosLiquid can be used with quadratic tokens without any modification. At a first sight I’d say probably not.

I think you are right, proxy tokens have deactivated methods like transfer, etc.

[donosonaumczuk]

Hi all, I can agree on the bad distribution of PNK token, taking into account that a “fair distribution” is really important for a justice protocol when using token-weighted mechanisms. And because of that, I agree with the arbitrator change.

However, I am not completely sold about using UBI as arbitrator token. I think PNK fixed supply is an important property for the Kleros mechanism to work correctly. It makes 51% attacks really hard and expensive to perform, as buying half of tokens having fixed supply will have a huge price impact (see Kleros whitepaper for more details).

I understand generating “artificial demand” over UBI token is needed, but I don’t think it will be done at cost of Proof of Humanity court security. And I think it is important to think UBI as a project that uses PoH, not as the same one.

If UBI is used as arbitrator token, because of its constantly increasing supply, I would say that it will be easy for a whale to attack the court in a cheap way. Even if we argue that the increasing supply is constantly diluting whales, that’s true in the perspective of UBI balance (looking at it just as ERC-20), but not sure that will be translated to the court/juror context. All jurors should be constantly buying UBI and staking it in the court to fight potential whales that appear, it does not look as a desired behavior (aside of the fact that will increase UBI demand).

But I didn’t came here to criticize, I have a proposal: HPNK.

You can create a new ERC-20 token, let’s call it HPNK (Human PNK or Human Pinakion). So every human already registered in Proof of Humanity will be able to claim a certain fixed and equal amount of HPNK (note that HPNK have fixed supply).

Then you can change the arbitrator to an identical one but just using HPNK instead of PNK. All properties designed by Kleros team will still be there, as the HPNK follow same properties as HPNK, but with the difference that is “fairly distributed” to all humans in the registry. This means the DAO will be achieving its goal of self-maintainance of the registry without putting it on security risk.

Implementation is also much more easier, which is also important to reduce the chance of any kind of exploit.

Only drawback I think you can mention is that this does not give utility to UBI token. But as I said, for me is important to see UBI and PoH as different things, the former depending on the latter, but not vice-versa.

[santisiri]

@donosonaumczuk

You can create a new ERC-20 token, let’s call it HPNK (Human PNK or Human Pinakion). So every human already registered in Proof of Humanity will be able to claim a certain fixed and equal amount of HPNK (note that HPNK have fixed supply).

Alan, I think the analysis in your reply as a whole is a must read to everyone groking this thread. Thanks for sharing your input.

Something I’m actively talking with @clesaege consists about allocating the 2.1M UBI the Kleros Coop withdrew from the liquidity pool on Uniswap to a new LP with the PNK token…. this plus the fact that Kleros is debating a KIP to airdrop PNK to humans I think will help align better the interests of both communities.

How could an UBI <> PNK liquidity pool be helpful in any way to the HPNK strategy you are thinking about? are there things that could be thought with Aave as well?

[leonelmessi.eth]

muy interesante alan

[donosonaumczuk]

@santisiri

Alan, I think the analysis in your reply as a whole is a must read to everyone groking this thread. Thanks for sharing your input.

First of all, thanks for the compliment, a pleasure to contribute here.

@santisiri

How could an UBI <> PNK liquidity pool be helpful in any way to the HPNK strategy you are thinking about?

I personally don’t see any way to help the HPNK strategy through UBI or PNK. I think HPNK should be a fresh unlinked token. But I’d love to hear more ideas.

In telegram channels some discussions around HPNK already started, surpringly fast! One of them about if HPNK should be claimed by humans on a PoH-registry snapshot at the time of the HPNK release or if it should be able to be claimed by every future human registered in PoH (I think we should be careful about double-claims, but @ludovico @juanu mentioned PoH v2 SBT ID for preventing that, the problem is that will delay the arbitrator change until PoH v2 release).

[clesaege]

@donosonaumczuk

its goal of self-maintainance

I think that’s where we may have differences. The goal when we created Proof Of Humanity was to be the best (in term of security and ease of us) sybil resistant registry.
“Self-maintenance” by itself doesn’t achieve anything. It can only be tool. Here I think this would have a negative impact on the registry by lowering security and putting the project outside of the Kleros ecosystem.

If the project wanted to be completely “Self-maintaining”, it should also make his own chain (but would require extra work, have lower security and cut itself from the Ethereum ecosystem).
The case with Kleros is similar.

@donosonaumczuk

You can create a new ERC-20 token, let’s call it HPNK (Human PNK or Human Pinakion). So every human already registered in Proof of Humanity will be able to claim a certain fixed and equal amount of HPNK (note that HPNK have fixed supply).

This would still suffer from the same issue of not mutualizing security with the wider Kleros ecosystem.

[littlestar]

@santisiri

The examples mentioned on my reply can be googled so you get a sense of what they are about, that’s why I included them. There’s obviously way more than that, you can check http://paper.democracy.earth to see the many avenues that where explored during that time to pursuit our goals.

We have made a paper that details the pilots we held in places like Hong Kong, Colombia, Colorado and with other web3 companies like Blockstack. You may find it here: http://www.dropbox.com/s/wzf7n7n5fhf09zx/Democracy%20Earth%20Pilots%20Report.pdf?dl=0 … The pilots helped us understand how to do elections using blockchain, different models of democracy that make sense according to specific contexts and identifying the core aspect to solve: identity.

It is not clear how this was spent on UBI particularly, looks more like an unrelated governance initiatives.

@santisiri

Things might seem obvious today, but they weren’t back in 2018. If you enjoy voting democratically with Proof of Humanity, we do too and take pride in the fact this is indeed the most democratic DAO in Ethereum. How to achieve this was not clear at all back then.

The study of different Proof of Personhood projects which lead Democracy Earth to choose Proof Of Humanity is the only thing which seems to me as UBI related. 1.2M$ is quite high for just assessing to use a project made by Kleros.

@santisiri

1.2M in the context of the 2017/2018 bubble was actually a small raise and we didn’t do an ICO or stuff like that since it was a regulated offering in the US, keep in mind we are a Californian company. Democracy Earth had a team of 6 full time engineers / product managers / researchers employed in New York and San Francisco plus more than 100 volunteers from different cities around the world that helped us implement the pilots we held.

Why did you pay San Francisco salaries for a project of basic income? It seems most of the money went to pay SF salaries and not for UBI which is only worth 0.5M$. (conflict of interest)

@santisiri

If you get a sense what are the market rates to hire engineers there, you’d realize we did a good job.

The outcome you showed seems pretty small. I don’t even know if those would be enough for a PhD candidate to pass, so it doesn’t seem in the range of a 1.2M$ work.

Could you possibly show any transparency report detailing the use of the funds, the average salaries paid, etc?

[santisiri]

The organization files its annual reports as a 501 c 3 to the corresponding governmental entities in the U.S. and its donors (which include Y Combinator, Templeton World Charity Foundation, Shuttleworth Foundation among others). I shared with you reports already on the research and pilots we held which are open to the general public. If you think building a global community around digital democracy happens overnight, there’s not much I can do to convince you about the value of our efforts.

Democracy Earth started and still is a non profit organization that aims to research democracy in the Information Age and it does so by contributing and building to open source tools, using censorship resistant networks for free to the world. Proof of Humanity and UBI are by far today the top priority of our efforts and contributions. Back in 2018 this wasn’t clear to us, consider that PoH wasn’t even coded nor mentioned anywhere back then.

When we started it wasn’t clear to us what would be the path towards digital democracy on the internet. But we built for that goal since the very beginning. Today it’s definitely more evident that smart contracts, Ethereum, Proof of Humanity, UBI are the places we want to build with.

[littlestar]

@santisiri

The organization files its annual reports as a 501 c 3 to the corresponding governmental entities in the U.S.

Could I, as one of UBI holders, get some access to this report? Specially the public financial statements over the last years?

@santisiri

its donors (which include Y Combinator, Templeton World Charity Foundation, Shuttleworth Foundation among others)

You mentioned there are some donors, so it means Democracy Earth got even more than 1.2M$.
Did Democracy Earth actually use the money of the UBI sale for purposes other than UBI?

@santisiri

Proof of Humanity and UBI are by far today the top priority of our efforts and contributions.

@santisiri

Today it’s definitely more evident that smart contracts, Ethereum, Proof of Humanity, UBI are the places we want to build with.

You do mention Proof of Humanity most of the time. Did Democracy Earth make any financial contributions to create Proof of Humanity?

Also other side projects like Yubiai marketplace are funded by other organisations. Is democracy earth
currently funding any project related with UBI?

[donosonaumczuk]

@clesaege

The goal when we created Proof Of Humanity was (…)

Take into account I wasn’t talking about the goal of PoH itself but the goal that the DAO (or rather some DAO members) are trying to achieve through this proporsal. I could have expressed myself wrong.

@clesaege

If the project wanted to be completely “Self-maintaining”, it should also make his own chain (but would require extra work, have lower security and cut itself from the Ethereum ecosystem).

I agree, as I said I could have chosen incorrect words. I think the idea is not being completely “self-maintaining” but DAO members achieving bigger impact in the courts. I know this could be done just by buying PNK, but looks like some DAO members are specially concerned in how is that token distributed among holders, they want to dilute whales, which I think is not easy to do at this point.

@clesaege

This would still suffer from the same issue of not mutualizing security with the wider Kleros ecosystem.

I partially agree with you here. I agree on that the higher the demand for the arbitration token, ceteris paribus, the higher the court security. So PNK having demand because all Kleros ecosystem is better than a new token which demand is only generated by the PoH court. But I think that if the new token is scarce it could be secure too.

I also want to flag that I don’t think that having a new token is the ideal case, but the alternative is just doing nothing. So if the DAO decides to perform an arbitrator change, I would rather use a new token that follows Kleros design properties (i.e. the proposed HPNK) than other that does not (e.g. UBI).

---

Lastly, I think is fair to mention that I’m not an official member of the DAO. I’m not registered in PoH nor hold any UBI. I’m participating in the discussion because:

1. I found it interesting in political/governance terms.
2. I am interested in PoH future and I was worried about the project security being put in risk if UBI was chosen as arbitration token (reason why I came with a “mid-point alternative” that allows achieving proposal goal but, to my consideration, highly reducing security risks).