That’s a mouth full of a marketing statement. I wouldn’t give too much on it.
After all, Cardano is in the first place still a cryptocurrency on a blockchain and, of course, inherits the very capitalistic principles of that.
The belief that capitalism, free enterprise is the “good for all” shines through in the “to create possibility for the many, as well as the few” in the paragraph below that. “To create possibility” … classic dogwhistle for the ideology that you only have to give the people “freedom” and the ones who deserve it will be successful.
Not necessarily what I personally believe. To me, it is an interesting experiment on technology, on funding projects, on implementing certain kinds of transactions with “smart” contracts and blockchain technology. But I would still search the “good for all” elsewhere, in traditional politics and activism, which should also set the borders to the free enterprise and wealth accumulation in cryptocurrencies as well as in all other areas of business.
Some of those smart people believe that plutocracy is actually good, at least in the confinements of a crypto ecosystem, akin to public companies where your voting power is also your share in the company. Some of those smart people don’t actually deem it that optimal, but do not believe that any of the alternatives is really viable. And some do advocate that we try something else.
There’s a quite large “quadratic voting” fanbase and a lot of voices for “one person, one vote”. Without a governance system in place, they’d have to have a very convincing alternative developed to change how it is done at the moment. With a governance system in place in the future, they’d have to win a “one ADA, one vote” vote to change to something else. Not sure what is more promising.
That was changed quite substantially in Fund 10. I do think, it cannot be gamed that easily anymore. Personally, I would have just removed assessments and reviews completely. Don’t see that much value in texts that are read by a tiny minority (given that the proposals themselves are already overwhelming) and ratings that in principle can never really be comparable across proposals.
On the one hand: There is no actor “Catalyst”. There is the IOG Catalyst Team that currently manages the fund. And they do not have a rule that says anything about the realisation of other proposals influencing the funding of one proposal.
For my taste, they already have too many rules that were just invented out of thin air that they do enforce (e.g., moving proposals between challenges/categories, removing proposals completely if they are “obviously” not okay, …). I would leave much more of that to the voters.
On the other hand, not (yet) having finished a previous proposal does not seem like a good rule to exclude from further funding of other proposals to me. The proposals could have had a plan running longer in the first place. They could have legitimate reasons for failing (and then not getting the funding for further milestones of that proposal).
Do you have any indication that those large entities – MLabs, dcSpark, … – are exceptionally bad at delivering what they promised in their proposals? It is possible to raise the problem that they get such a large share of funding without painting them as bad actors.
To my knowledge, they are not at all.
Yes, of course, this is one of the reasons why trying to come up with “quadratic voting” or “one person, one vote” systems that do make sense is so hard. Only way out I see is to accept that some will do wallet-splitting and accept as still being better than pure “one ADA, one vote”.
But up to now, there is no incentive for wallet splitting, so the number of wallets is probably still at least close to reality. It doesn’t have any relevance for the result, anyway, and is purely informational. And it is not splitted in wallets for and wallets against which makes it not that interesting.
As above: Of course, it is. Cryptocurrencies are to a large extent a capitalist endeavour.
At the moment: Nothing. There has even been an offer – I think by Optim – to borrow ADA specifically for the snapshot.
There are ideas to prevent that or make it harder: Take the median of the stake in the last X epochs as voting weight. Require locking the voting weight for the duration of the vote. …
See above: There are legitimate reasons for a project being slowed down or failing.
For the same proposal: That’s exactly what milestones are for. Across all proposals: Same as above, does not make sense to me. There might be legitimate reasons.
And as in the previous message: If you make the rules too hard, proposals will just be proposed by individuals, smaller companies founded especially for that purpose, … instead.
I don’t think a “diversity and inclusivity philosophy” can be promised if the decision is ultimately up to the voters.
But:
There will be no challenges anymore in future funds, but broader “categories” that are currently being designed:
Don’t know how far that process is and if you still have a chance to get the idea of regional categories in or modify that to have more non-technical proposals. The non-technical ones seem to somehow fit in the “Community Outreach and Impact” category. But they’d still have to be about something that somehow evolves Cardano. It’s still not a charity fund.
And I personally would prefer to have no categories at all and just a large competition of all proposals. Don’t see a reason to “protect” some categories when distributing “our” funds.
All in all, it is very intransparent how changes to Catalyst are supposed to work, where to submit ideas, who will decide how etc. pp. That obviously has been a problem for a long time if you read the messages in this thread.