Reposting this, since I accidentally managed to delete it.
Edit: Thank you for your input @cwgoes , I can agree with all of the points you made, and I encourage a longer discussion periods, as well as voting windows, in the future. A lesson (derived from my mistakes) I think all potential steward candidates can hopefully learn from.
Reply to: Thoughts on gov proposals before Phase 5
You have managed to convince me that we should probably vote NAY for this proposal, for the reason that it was made too early, and that the voting period is not long enough for us to properly discuss my candidacy. I also believe it would be reasonable to wait for these proposals to come after Phase 5, now that I have seen this reasoning.
I would like to emphasise, however, that I was not aware of the sentiment that we weren’t ready for non mainnet-phase proposals, and I believe communicating that was overlooked. I was under the impression that each phase meant we were ready for that functionality of Namada.
Reply to: Thoughts on this specific steward candidacy
I am going to have to disagree with the opinion that I am not fit to be a Steward. I will be outlining my reasons below.
Reminder of the purpose of PGF on Namada
Public goods funding on Namada, at least in the way that it is referenced and explained through Namada’s various means of communication:
(1) The specs
(2) The docs (althought this doesn’t talk much about the motivation behind it)
(3) This blog post about Namada’s first rpgf funding round
(4) This blog post about PGF on Namada
(5) This blog post about Namada’s positive sum economics
do not restrict the definition of public goods to protocols/projects that have:
- Not received much funding in the past (I will tackle why I think rpgf towards a project like Aleo is actually not as bad as you make it seem in another paragraph)
- Focused mainly on providing infrastructure/tooling for Namada specifically
- Properties meaning that cPGF is the best form of funding for them today.
Disclaimer: I was a contributing author to most of these pieces, so referencing these is to a large degree self reinforcement. However, these are the references to PGF on Namada that I am aware of, and I welcome other sources for discussion.
Rather, from the specs (1):
“Public goods, by their nature as non-excludable and non-rivalrous, are mis-modeled by economic systems (such as payment-for-goods) built upon the assumption of scarcity, and are usually either under-funded (relative to their public benefit) or funded in ways which require artificial scarcity and thus a public loss. For this reason, it is in the interest of Namada to help out, where possible, in funding the public goods upon which its existence depends in ways which do not require the introduction of artificial scarcity, balancing the costs of available resources and operational complexity.”
And this is the rationale for public goods funding that I have in mind when I mention these projects. I aim to fund projects that have benefited a large amount of people, that have not gone through the means of introducing artificial scarcity.
I would also like to mention that from (3), we can see the list of projects that we included in our first rPGF funding round, many of which I can now see are included in the list of projects that I have proposed above. These include:
- Zcash
- Tor
- Clap-rs
- Prost (a sub crate of tokio)
- Crates from rust lang
- Rayon
Which, to be frank cover most of the projects I had in mind, so I am happy to see that they already received funding. For the interested reader, this full list is published here.
I think the fact that Namada has provided rPGF funding to these set of projects is important in two ways:
- It emphasises @brentstone’s point that this proposal was done in a hastily manner (since had I taken the time to craft my candidates carefully, I would not include these candidates given that they have already been mentioned and rewarded previously)
- Contradicts @brentstone 's opinion that the candidates I propose indicate that I should be disqualified/not fit to be a steward. Rather, it shows that my ideas are in line with that of the project … (trusting of course that I thought of these candidates independently to reading the google sheets document, which of course cannot be verified, but is believable because I think I would not have proposed them if I knew they had already received funding).
Defending Aleo as a candidate for RPGF (as well as other projects that have received funding through other means)
These are very interesting questions, and I’m happy to answer them, one for one.
“What good is to allocate funds to [Aleo]”
My rationale for proposing Aleo as a candidate for rPGF nominations is that they should be rewarded for their commitment to open sourced technology. All of their backend code, including the language Leo that they have produced, have been open source.
Yes, they also got large amounts of funding. Yes they recently launched. But this, in my opinion, is completely irrelevant to their qualification as being a project that aligns strongly with Namada’s definition of what a public good that Namada aims to fund as described in the specs.
Instead, they have produced research that I would argue is directly in-line with Namada’s goals, including the idea to use Zero Knowledge cryptography in favour of things like TEEs in order to guarantee privacy. It has also developed Leo which provides very useful abstractions that allow less ZK-versed rust programmers (like myself) to be able to have an easier time writing ZK-involved code.
Regardless, I believe that they are viable candidates for rPGF because of the fact that they remained true to the idea of staying open source, which will benefit projects like Namada significantly. I would argue that their $200M funding did not stem from this commitment to an open-source stack, which means that they could have taken the closed-source route. By providing rewards in terms of rPGF to protocols like this, we provide future incentives for similar protocols to stay in the same track of dedicating themselves to an open-source stack.
“How does this benefit our community?”
I believe I answered that above, but mainly I would argue that “our community” is simply not just those using and building on Namada. Rather, “our community” should include anyone working towards the same goal of building open source, permissionless, decentralised, privacy preserving technology.
“In my opinion, this would be a wildly poor use of PGF funds.”
I would argue that if this were to be the case, then Namada’s rPGF allocation to ZCash was similarly, a wildly poor use of PGF funds. I don’t think this is true at all, and would argue that previous funding is at the very most minimally related to a project’s qualification for rpgf funding.
In summary,
I would like to say that I appreciate and understand the argument that we were not ready for this proposal, and that it was made hastily by myself. I admit to that.
I think for this reason, voting NAY for now, is a reasonable idea.
However, I feel I must provide a rebuttle to the idea that I am not fit for being a Steward in the long term. I feel like I would have liked to see more detailed points, with some references, that could convince me that how I am thinking about public goods funding is incorrect to the point where I should be disqualified. I would then hope to amend my view on what PGF on Namada is meant to be for, and then reapply with this in mind.
to have start/stop times for cPGF proposals.