Thank you so much Matthew, your communication is very helpful and I appreciate your honesty. Your tone of communication is also much appreciated.
I look forward to further dialog and hope we get official answers to community questions from the committee moving forward. Thank you!
Only some changes, need āimplementation in the nodeā. The ones currently discussed only need a parameter update which can just be issued by the signing authorities, governance key holders, IOG, CF, and Emurgo.
In fact, that changes to minPoolCost and k are possible without new node version and without a hard fork was one of the reasons I remember that the poll focussed on these.
Changes that some would have preferred ā such as replacing minPoolCost by a minPoolMargin or completely overhauling the reward sharing scheme, making pledge really relevant etc. pp. ā would need implementation, installation by SPOs, and a hard fork.
Well, the target date for enactment in
really sounded like we are much further in this process.
And the process itself is not that complicated. Itās signing a trancaction that replaces a 340 with a 170 with enough governance keys and throwing it on the chain. Period. Hopefully this involves some authorised people going to some kind of vault where those keys are stored ā so, more involved than me selling an ape on jpg.store, but not that much more involved.
That IOG, CF, and Emurgo should need yet another round of ādialogueā about everything from ātheir perspectiveā after all this, after everybody and their dog made up their mind about it weeks and months ago, would be a huge disappointment for all the waiting SPOs for sure.
Thanks for the extra details. Just to confirm, if stage 3 is complete and weāre at stage 4, does this mean the committee has actually proposed the changes to the signing authorities and is waiting for their response, or is there a step of āthe committee needs to write some document and send it to the signing authoritiesā?
I understand parameter changes canāt/shouldnāt be made lightly and I apologise if I sound overly pessimistic, but weāve been dragged along for so long. Every epoch the % of fees a small SPO is forced to take from delegators grows, and the divide between big and small pool returns gets larger. Delaying this isnāt just not improving things, itās actively making them worse.
Itās not entirely constructive, but it is important context.
Constructive is properly recognizing that the problem is the genesis keyholders telling you NO and requiring you to come up with more committees, process, votes, considerations, cautions, games, delays, rehashes, backsteps because they told you NO. The problem is they can tell you NO and there is no on-chain vote.
I already added my $0.02 on CIP-1694, including the election of a constitutional committee instead of the appointment of a constitutional centralized committee. The genesis keyholders responded to me: NO. They told me they will appoint their centralized ābootstrappingā committee as a set instead of community-led individual member voting/replacement/confirmation.
The problem is the genesis keys. The problem is committees instead of on-chain voting. A lobster was named with on chain voting long ago. Recently billions of stake voted on a poll (led only by a genesis keyholder).
King Kevin needs to abolish the committee, allow CF to hold parameter polls, OBEY the democratic result on each parameter, and shepherd Cardano to Voltaire-HF. The best you can do now is on-chain polls (not like you tried, instead a poll per parameter with 4-6 options), use the genesis keys to obey the democratic result, and abolish the centralized bureaucracy committee delays stalling centralization. Abolishing the committee is the Voltaire-spirit democratic option.
Iām pointing out that I was forced to engineer the architecture of Egal because a CIP to correct genesis key genesis architecture is impossible.
Thanks Sean, I did think it was as simple as a transaction.
But @Matthew_Capps1 it would be really good to know how we (the community), get to know where the genesis key holders are in their decision making process. The meeting notes seem to indicate we will not be getting any more updates from the committee as the PCP-001 action has been closed.
Or is the committee still responsible for doing the Change Request?
Ultimately, how is the rest of the process going to be communicated?
I need to dive deeper into this to understand 
Itās not a trivial distinction, but to the context of the progression the main thing is that a change request is made which can be implemented, and that thereās a distinction between that and actually making the change.
Yeah, as I mentioned earlier
To your point here
At this point, all the extra process that Iām aware of is about doing it right, not about hesitancy or cold-feet about the PCās recommendation. Itās up to your judgment ultimately whether we succeed in that (and partly we will be helping you make the judgment with public communications like the SPO calls, these updates, and the forthcoming blogposts).
Everything is slowed though by the fact that no one (as far as Iām aware) has the PC in their job description. The PCās work may be the kind of thing the MBO (Intersect) pays people to have as their top professional priority in future, but we arenāt quite there yet.
Thereās no special way to communicate recommendations. It can be done any way the committee chooses. Right now the medium with the lowest latency is the meeting notes of the PC here in the Cardano forum. So yep, since the recommendation was communicated, step 3 is done.
What youāve mentioned about a special technical document is (as I understand the process) in step 5, and here the signing authorities may request more info from relevant members of the Parameter Committee in creating the formal change request that can be referenced for the change.
But I donāt want to preface this all too much here because it is a new process, which Iām describing informally, and when steps 4 and 5 area ready, they will be made public. I donāt know for sure where the communication will come from yet, but Iām sure it will be amplified widely.
Thanks for the question! Unfortunately, this is all I can say for the moment about where things will be communicated.
And as for what the next step is, the rest of my reply to DanTup should help at least a little: Aug 17, 2023 | Voltaire era: Parameter committee intermediate state - #27 by Matthew_Capps1
+1 on this, appreciate it Matt
Hm. This is interesting. I think what we might have here is a philosophical disagreement about how democracy is instantiated.
Iāll be having discussions about political philosophy wrt Cardano governance as a personal project pretty soon. Perhaps we can come to a better accord (or at least mutual understanding) in that context.
Agreed. Thanks for reframing for me.
Worth noting that even when Voltaire era on-chain voting occurs, IOG will have a size-able voting power from ICO Genesis. Not much may change.
On the one hand, I can totally understand that and it can, of course, happen in a larger organisation. That not anybody can empower themselves to just take up the shovel and fix such a situation is actually good and professional.
On the other hand, IOG is not particularly transparent about its organisation. And that all of you also use personal accounts when communicating āofficiallyā in your work time doesnāt make it easier to distinguish for us. From your refreshingly clear posts here, I take it that you are doing this in your spare time and I totally appreciate that.
Even if nobody (except @Joaquin?) is responsible for the committee, somebody has to be responsible for the signatures on governance transactions (and has to have been responsible for the previous years). That person or persons should be able to tell us what it takes to finally happen, donāt they?
Do I understand this correctly that the committee does not contact the signing authorities with a proposal, but just posts here (and hopes they come by and read it and then decide to act upon it)?
I appreciate the answers, but I donāt feel Iām any closer to understanding what the next step is. I still have no idea who is driving this and whose court the ball is in.
The community has not been told exactly what kind of gathering the Parameters Committee is. We know that this committee does not have the authority to make decisions on protocol changes, but since the committee membership includes IOG and CF members, the community imagines that decisions made by this committee are generally decisions.
Just to clarify here: there is no need for the release of new node software for changing k and minPoolCost parameters. They can be changed with every epoch change.
With that in mind and the statement that the changes will be implemented in q3 (which ends this month btw.), either the poll is going to be ignored or something else is going on under the hood.
I think this stems from the fact that many people at IO both see themselves personally as Cardano Community members and also individually interact with some segment of the community regularly for their IO work. Such is the nature of blockchain and open source. But itās an interesting problem, and we could probably do better at it.
And yes, I am speaking here from personal interest, and also a sense of obligation from my volunteer role with the PC, to make it better understood. I think an advisory body thatās impartial and transparent is important for Cardanoās health (as do all the members of the PC afaict). This and my @cryptstitution twitter account are personal, and anything I say in these locations is from a personal perspective and at personal initiative. I specify this now in my profiles.
As far as my IO work, I am also helping to coordinate IO comms related to the PC, but thatās distinct from my volunteer work with the committee itself.
About responsibility-- within the committee there are different kinds / levels of responsibility.
The different roles and their membership are always published with the meeting minute updates. @Joaquin is graciously serving as secretary, which means that he makes the trains run on time haha.
Well at a general level as I understand it, this is the signing authorities, which as you know are IO, the CF, and Emurgo. I donāt know off the top of my head what the exact mechanism is. But I can try to get a greater level of detail on this into the forthcoming blog post.
Whatās important to understand is that the PC is not an entity with any power to make a change. Itās intentionally set up without that power, with members from across the ecosystem, so that its recommendations arenāt confused with the interests of any given party.
The Parameter Committee admits comms representatives from the signing authorities:
We attend the general meetings, get āread-onlyā access to the meeting minutes, and help coordinate with the respective organizations.
I specify that this is āread-only,ā so to speak because the PC doesnāt take direction from the signing authorities. It sets its own priorities and directions based on the needs it identifies from the ecosystem. In the latest case, the need for a recommendation about minPoolCost.
So, we donāt just wait for the signing authorities to stumble across these updates, we proactively let them know. In the case of the latest recommendation, the signing authorities have been informed and are progressing toward steps #4 and #5 in that progression I outlined. Itās a little slower now than it will be in future because this is the first time the process is running in this form.
Okay, that sounds again different than:
But maybe that doesnāt matter that much since:
That is long understood. But whatās important for people is: Now that the PC has made a rather simple to execute first recommendation, what is still holding it? Who can make it finally happen, again weeks after what the PC once has thought to be a reasonable timeline?
I mean, yes, they seem to have retracted that 23rd August, but the PC has a lot of technical expertise. Iām sure that date came from a deep understanding of how very much not hard it is to just adjust this one parameter.
And:
This is not really helpful. Who in those large and from the outside often rather intransparent organisations is in charge of that? Who has to be nudged to make it happen?
That would be good. Otherwise, the publicly visible people ā parameter committee, IOG employees that do communicate officially or privately ā will probably continue to be the target of impatience that has grown for years. Maybe not fair, but somehow understandable.
Our quotes are getting a little too recursive haha. But yeah, although these are volunteer positions that people are not being paid for (certainly not by the PC itself, and afaik, not by any other organization), they do come along with responsibilities. I donāt think Iāve said anything contradictory here.
As I mentioned earlier, the delays now are about getting it right from an institutional and communications perspective. I canāt do too much more to explain the details of that because a) itās still being worked out and b) there are dedicated communications upcoming that will explain more.
That sounds accurate to me. Some of it is unavoidable, and I donāt resent being the target of some frustration. The main thing is to make progress and keep substantial/effective communication flowing.
Look, I get it. The parameter committee are simply pawns.
It is amazing how much bureaucracy has been grown in order to manage this one parameter change (minPoolCost). A parameter that is not even part of the Ouroboros design and whose value was plucked from thin air.
The mandatory minPoolCost parameter effectively creates an anti-competitive regulation which small stake pool operators have been winging about for over 2 years (at least those that understand the effects properly).
Both these things occurred 1.5 years ago, and there have been numerous discussions on this forum, and now over 3months ago an on-chain vote got majority support to halve minPoolCost.
This is just a festering sore now. It is getting ridiculous.
Perhaps it is getting more interesting to think about: Why? Who benefits? What relationships?
The really sad thing is that there are now products like optim.finance ISPO bonds where stake pool operators are borrowing 250K Ada at 6.5% interest in a desperate attempt to grow their pools, but this is not enough. Even 1 million Ada pledge is not enough to overcome the 340 Ada minPoolCost disincentive for delegators.
I have pledged over 3 million Ada for my stake pool, but I still have this message to potential delegators on my website:
I do not recommend you stake with Terminada pool yet because the protocol does not allow setting the fixed fee any lower than 340 Ada.
With a fixed fee of 340 Ada you will lose too much of your rewards to fees until the pool size is over 10 million Ada.