Proposal to Reinstate the Uptime Mission in the Shielded Expedition Incentivised Testnet

[kw1knode]

X-Posting my own thoughts for visibility here.

@Gavin

Primary reason: Client-restart bug → jailed ~100 validators and kept them jailed for a month. I’ve asked for more details about the bug to share here, because I don’t know there were some validators that were not affected.

Not everyone affected by the restart bug experienced significant issues. Operators with a backup node and proper monitoring would be promptly alerted to the problem and could switch to the running node, minimizing any disruptions. The fact that 100 people did not take these precautions does not mean that the issue was unfixable.

1. Secondary reason: Asymmetric communications → coordination for restarting the chain was exclusively done in the private SE100 channels at least twice. This affect Pilots who were not in the SE100 channels, because they were not notified about what client changes needed to be made until after the chain had resumed making blocks.

From the outset, the SE-100 cohort was intentionally kept small to facilitate initial operations and reduce the need for extensive coordination. Despite the PvP nature of this testnet, some SE-100 participants posted updates in the general channel, demonstrating engagement. Additionally, some postgen validators successfully met the uptime metrics, proving that maintaining these standards was achievable. On a personal note, I had requested the team to stop using @here in Discord. While it’s important to retrospectively acknowledge the team’s misses, it is unjust to punish participants who had no control over these oversights. Recognizing past mistakes is valuable, but punishing the participants for issues beyond their control is not a reasonable approach.

1. Tertiary reason: Uptime calculation → blocks_validator_signed / total_blocks essentially meant that you could only compete for the uptime missions if you were in the active set for the entire competition. This affected the Pilots that were not in the genesis validator set, because the active set had 256 slots and there were thousands of Pilots with the same number of tokens that had to find ways to get enough NAAN to compete with one another to get into and stay in the active set. Genesis validators did not have to compete because for a slot because 115 of them had substantially more NAAN.

This design flaw has been present from the beginning, and retroactively punishing participants for it is unfair. Instead, I propose taking a broader approach by calculating misses from the moment a validator posted the create-validator transaction to the marked end block of the testnet. However, this raises questions about when to determine eligibility, especially if a validator joined in later epochs like 10, 30, or 40. There was significant incentivization for this task, leading to the bounty being completed due to this motivation. Namada received prompt responses from validators during the testnet. Validators cannot submit more tasks once the testnet has ended, nor should the rules be changed after the fact.

In most jurisdictions, it is generally considered unethical and potentially illegal to change the rules of a contest after it has ended in a way that prevents winners from claiming their prizes. Contest rules form a binding agreement between the organizer and the participants.