Thank you for this response. I replied to your comment on reddit and will paste my response here too.
I see that the paper has been updated on July 4th and the points about Dash which I mentioned here have been removed?
The report on DGS you refer to appears to have a dead link (https://files.zotero.net/18675828634/Dash-Governance-System.pdf). I did not see this report in the reference list and have not read it (yet). If this report had been referenced within the body of the text (as other citations are), and it presents a rationale for the figures used, I probably wouldn’t have commented on that aspect (although I feel it is a little churlish to throw shade on a competitor project in a paper like this).
We insist on the importance of utilize the knowledge of community experts in the decision-making process via delegation and ballot privacy to the voters to provide the soundness of funding decisions, coercion resistance and other desirable properties of the proposed voting scheme. The description of the Cardano treasury system itself is interesting. I am looking forward to seeing this application of liquid democracy in action. In our proposal, we have lower risks that exist only for one treasury period with limited funding; inappropriate realizations of a proposal supposes downvoting it for the next period.
Forgive me if this is in the paper, but how much ADA will this system be distributing per period initially?
I don’t see how Cardano’s treasury periods are different to Dash’s (where multi-month proposals can also be “downvoted” if they are perceived to be progressing poorly). Consequently, I don’t follow how the risks are lower than for Dash, as I am assuming the USD$ value available per period will be much higher than it was in Dash’s infancy.
In our opinion, 100% efficiency is unreachable in the real world.
I agree.
For a long-term self-sustainable cryptocurrency platform, allowing probes and small scale mistakes in the evolution process is more efficient than attempts to put constant control on each small action of proposal implementation, with the need of extra verification of control level quality, etc.
I agree on the need for probes and mistakes, but I’m not sure what your statement about this being more efficient is based on.
My view on payment up-front for winning proposals is that it will make trust in the proposer a major factor in decision-making. This will advantage entities that the community already trusts (IOHK presumably being chief among these).
Proposers who are relatively unknown to the community are unlikely to be successful with big proposals unless some trusted entity can vouch for them. Based on Dash’s history, they will either have to prove themselves by executing smaller proposals or make an arrangement with a trusted entity to provide some sort of escrow service - which may incur a fee, and would give that entity power that they can exercise in an opaque way.
For treasury decision-makers, it seems sub-optimal to me that they would have to consider whether the proposer is likely to follow through on the proposal or deliver something half-baked, or abscond with the funds, alongside the proposal’s merits if it were to be funded and executed well. A lack of recourse if a proposer keeps the funds and does nothing will influence decision-making and, I would guess, the aggregate productivity of funded proposals.
If the treasury paper is to be further iterated, I would suggest that it could be strengthened with an articulation of why payment up-front is preferred (such as you provided in this comment). I think this is a defensible position, but when it’s not mentioned it looks like it hasn’t been considered.