Crypto Lions - Policy Positions & Code of Conduct

in #eos6 years ago (edited)

The purpose of this article is to familiarize the EOS community with our philosophy and stances on various issues.

We follow in the footsteps of other BP teams including EOS Gravity, EOS New York, EOS 42, and EOS Blocksmiths.

We collected issues from the EosGo forums, as well as from the EOSIO Gov Telegram group, and we specifically attempted include more controversial issues which do not have obvious answers.

Here we rate every issue on this scale:





For each issue, we describe our general position, and then, where appropriate, we announce the actions we have taken or plan to take.

Restatement of our values

  • Sophrosyne - Inspired by Eos being the ancient Greek goddess of the Dawn, sophrosyne is an ancient Greek concept of an ideal of excellence of character and soundness of mind, which when combined in one well-balanced individual leads to other qualities, such as temperance, moderation, prudence, purity, and self-control.

  • Respect - To everyone. Always. This begins with respect for the EOS community and its constitution.

  • Competence - Meeting the technical, organizational, and legal demands of EOS block producers.

  • Integrity - Being honest with others and with ourselves. Doing what we say we'll do.

Category I. EOS GOVERNANCE

1. EOS Constitution - Block Producers will obey the EOS Constitution.

(obviously)

Crypto Lions Position: We will fund performance bonds by which the community can penalize us for violations.

2. BP Code of Conduct - BPs will obey the BP Code of Conduct.

(Not yet published, but referened here.)

(obviously)

Crypto Lions Position: We will fund performance bonds by which the community can penalize us for violations.

(We will not separately cover the much-discussed issue of vote buying since it seems like it will be prohibited by both the Constitution and the BP Code of Conduct. We are against vote buying, and encourage the suppression of any behavior that mimics vote buying.)

Category II. BUSINESS

3. Transparency of Funding and Ownership - BPs should be self funded.

General Explanation: BPs should be judged primarily by how they behave.

Crypto Lions Position: We are 100% self-funded. All funding comes from a subset of the team members listed in our initial announcement and on cryptolions.io.

4. Legal Entity - BPs should be registered as legal entities.

General Explanation: The legal challenges which EOS may face are not fully known. We think the most resilient community is one that offers a healthy mix of legal businesses, informal groups, and decentralized organizations. We want a market place of ideas to sort out the best approach.

Crypto Lions Position: We are in the process of creating a legal entity in Germany. (We will create a UG with the goal of becoming a GMBH by the end of the summer.) After considering multiple jurisdictions, we decided that the Germany offered the best combination of a strong legal tradition, and sufficiently articulated laws pertaining to crypto currencies.

Concerns have been raised by the EU's looming privacy requirements known as "GDPR". Our reading of the GDPR's "Territorial Scope" (https://gdpr-info.eu/art-3-gdpr/) suggests that all EOS BPs regardless of where they are located will be equally culpable. So there is no special disadvantage to being located in the EU.

If it becomes an issue, we will change jurisdictions.

5. Transparency of Finances - BPs should publish their operating expenses, dividend payments, etc.

General Explanation: At a minimum, BPs should publish the equivalent of a quarterly Statement of Cashflow. We strongly believe that transparency is essential to building trust. This is especially important as new communities are forming.

Crypto Lions Position: We will exceed the quarterly Statement of Cashflow standard by publishing detailed monthly statements.

6. Exclusivity - BPs should only support chains that give value to the ERC20 distribution.

(This controversial question was precipitated by the crypto currency WAX's declaration that they'll migrate to an EOS clone. Opinions diverged strongly, and the community seemed to acknowledge that we don't yet know how multiple-chains will work.)

General Explanation: We are neutral in the sense that we would still support a great block producer team providing services to other EOS-based blockchains, like WAX. With so much uncertainty surrounding the economics of block production, we would not take issue with other BP teams simultaneously supporting other chains.

Crypto Lions Position: After much discussion, we have decided to bear the risk of only supporting chains which give value to the initial ERC20 distribution until the end of 2018 with the exceptions articulated below. We will re-examine this stance every six months.

Conditions and Exceptions:

  • We define "support" as the installation and maintenance of hardware and software which produces blocks on an EOS block chain, or systems that directly supports such hardware and software.

  • There may arise low cost "charity chains". We consider these potential onboarding environments into the EOS eco-system, and would support them.

  • Exclusivity does not cover free or paid consulting services. In our Jungle Testnet Telegram (https://t.me/jungletestnet), we will continue assisting and answering questions without restrictions.

  • Exclusivity does not cover the development of open source software, like our cool Testnet monitor, or the paid development of customized scripts.

7. Performance Bonds - BPs should lock part of their revenue in one or several performance bonds.

General Explanation: BPs should offer a guarantee to the community by locking away a portion of their block rewards together with a detailed and carefully written code of conduct, with the promise that they'll relinquish all of part of their performance bond if they violate their code of conduct.

Crypto Lions Position: We will lock a significant portion of excess revenue in performance bonds. We haven't yet decided whether they should be monthly, quarterly, or yearly.

Category III. SECONDARY RESPONSIBILITIES

By far, the most important job of the BP is to produce blocks and fullfill the duties immediately related to block production (like cooperating with arbiters and communicating with other block producers).

Assuming revenue is sufficient to cover a) operating expenses, b) infrastructure expansion, and c) reward entrepreneurial risk, a question arises about what a Block Producer should do with excess revenue.

We see five possibilities:

  • Fund EOS tools and Dapps
  • Promote EOS locally and online
  • Donate to the worker proposal fund
  • Donate to non-EOS related charities
  • Burn tokens

EOS Blocksmith has taken the unique position that all excess revenue will either be burned or donated to the WP fund. (We are posting this with their permission.)

We do not disagree with any of these approaches. All BPs will be under pressure to create value. There are many ways to create value. We want to see an environment of experimentation and innovations.

Here are more detailed answers:

8. Dapps & project development - BPs should fund projects that support EOS.

General Explanation: In the very young ecosystem, and many things need to be built. Block Producers have already paid the cost of learning the ecosystem, and have a headstart on identifying weaknesses and opportunities. We think that direct BP funding may be more responsive and innovating than the worker proposal process. Of course, the pressure will be on to demonstrate the value created, and work should happen under the following restrictions:

  • no for-profit projects
  • absolutely no conflicts of interests
  • excessive transparency
  • seek additional mechanisms for additional oversight

Crypto Lions Position: We have built and shared numerous testnet-related projects and tutorials. We see opportunities to create value for the community and would likely devote some of our block rewards to better pursuing those opportunities on behalf of the community.

9. EOS Promotion - BPs should spend their revenue promoting EOS.

General Explanation: BPs should do what they are in a position to do. If a BP is in a region where EOS isn't yet popular, or if a BP's team members are experienced in marketing, then it's perfectly reasonable for them to spend block rewards on promotion.

Crypto Lions Position: As the only Ukraine-based BP candidate, and one of the few from a post-Soviet country, we plan to accelerate our translation project into Russian and Ukrainian, which is currently in its infancy. If no one else is doing it, we may expand translation into Romanian and Turkish. We also want to fund and organize events in our region, like last Friday's meetup.

10. Worker Proposal Donation - BPs should donate to the worker proposal fund.

General Explanation: BPs also create value by empowering other parts of the eco-system.

Crypto Lions Position: Maybe.

11. Charities - BPs should donate to charities.

General Explanation: In our view, this is the most controversial secondary responsibility because many questions arise when choosing a charity, but we welcome diverse approaches.

Crypto Lions Position: We have no plans to donate to general charities. We want to create wealth and watch others donate to whichever charities they choose.

12. Burning Tokens - BPs should burn part of their revenue.

General Explanation: Burning tokens increases the value of other tokens.

Crypto Lions Position: Maybe.

Category IV. BLOCK PRODUCER ECONOMICS

These decisions will be made for us by either Block.one or the community, and we will abide by the decisions. However we wanted to take positions on these issues anyway.

13. BP Cliff Reduction - Block Rewards should be smoothed out so that there isn't a big drop between BP #21 and #22.

General Explanation: A sudden drop in rewards between positions 21 and 22 risks creating incentives for various short-sighted behaviors. Smoothing the drop off in rewards would likely mitigate this.

14. Term Limits - BPs should not be allowed to operate in the top 21 indefinitely.

General Explanation: We would support mild term limits. For example, requiring block producers to sit out the equivalent of three or four weeks per year, after which they could return to block production. We think this would help keep backup BP nodes funded by giving them more block rewards, and may also make BP collusion more difficult.

15. BP Rotation to ensure Readiness - BPs should be unpredictably rotated into one of the 21 block-producer slots to ensure their readiness.

General Explanation: We think this may have the benefits of sharing block rewards and ensuring readiness, however it should wait until the chaos of the initial launch settles down. We are also concerned that this may introduce latency.

16. BP inflation Bidding - BPs should bid on inflation. Some aggregate of bids will determine the ratio of Worker Proposal funding versus BP funding.

General Explanation: Our hope is that 1) voters remain engaged to evaluating all aspects of a BPs performance, and 2) information centers will evolve to assist voters. Inflation bidding simplifies the competition between BPs by calling attention to a single detail. It may be necessary if voters are apathetic, but it risks outshining many other aspects of a BPs performance.

17. Avoiding BP Overpayment

General Explanation: We agree. We also suspect that market forces will take care of this.

18. BP 1% inflation Cap -

General Explanation: Though today's token price makes 1% seem extremely attractive, this figure should somehow to pegged to some non-crypto measure of value, like gold or fiat.

Category V. MISC ISSUES

19. Worker Proposal Process - The worker proposal process should be as proposed.

General Explanation: Given that we are less than five weeks from launch, we support the proposed plan. Our ideas for refinements can themselves by submitted as worker proposals.

Our concern is that having only a single monolithic process for all proposals does not create a marketplace which can discover the best processes. We would prefer to see side-by-side approaches to funding so that they can be compared.

Communities and community funding have some inherent weaknesses. One of the alternative approaches we might like to experiment with is funding talented individuals instead of project specifications.

Another approach we might like to try is allowing more risk tolerance. It seems unlikely that a vote-by-community would support the type of endeavors in which there's a 90% failure rate, but the 10% of successes are so big that they make everything worthwhile.

We don't know the best process for funding, but we like the idea of creating a marketplace that might discover them.

20. Random Reward for Active Voters

General Explanation: We suggest only bringing this up after a problem of voter apathy surfaces. Hopefully good information sources arise and make BP evaluation quick and efficient.

21. Arbitration Cost - Arbitration expenses should be reimbursed when damages are awarded to the victim.

General Explanation: This is an important question. We just haven't evaluated it sufficiently enough to take a position.

22. Arbitration Precedence - Future arbiters are bound by the decisions of present/past arbiters.

General Explanation: This is a very important question. We just haven't evaluated it sufficiently enough to take a position.

23. Universal Standing - Anybody should be able to bring a crime to arbitration.

(This has not been a subject of active discussion. We raised the issue, and remain interested in it.)

General Explanation: We think EOS will be robust enough to operate with or without this, however we think Universal Standing is a good idea. Discussion here.

🦁🦁🦁

http://cryptolions.io/
https://github.com/CryptoLions
https://steemit.com/@cryptolions
https://twitter.com/EOS_CryptoLions
Jungle Testnet Monitor: http://jungle.cryptolions.io:9898/monitor/
General CryptoLions Chat: https://t.me/block_producer_candidate
Testnet Chat: https://t.me/jungletestnet

Sort:  

It seems we've neglected on important issue: BP Voting policy -

Should BPs vote publicly? Should BPs self-vote? What other requirements should be placed on BP voting?

We would support a broad effort to ban self-voting, however this is psychologically difficult to do. In one Interview, Thomas Cox said it was probably okay under 1%.

For the time-being we will operate under these rules:

  • Self voting is okay if you own < 1% of issued tokens.
  • Voting should be public (I think this happens anyway).
  • BPs should be familiar with other BP teams, and should use all of their 30 votes.

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