But it's not win-win-win when somebody can propose something that exclusively enriches a certain few people, and those certain few people have enough power to make that proposal effective. This is an effective kleptocracy, and I don't think that anybody really wants to be associated with that.
I won't comment on the whole post, but you are mistaken about the meaning of the 10% threshold for approving proposals. It is not realistic for Evan & the rest of the Core team to past a self-serving proposal against the wishes of the rest of the community since the formula for approval is
YES VOTES - NO VOTES > 10%. In other words, so long as Evan and Core own less than 54.9% of the MNs (since 54.9% - 45.1% = 9.8%) they can't do anything like you describe above. And no, there is zero evidence that they own even 1000MNs much less than the approx 2400 nodes you would need for that attack.
The current system may indeed have yet undiscovered flaws, but a small group of people with a lot of MNs overriding the wishes of the entire community is not one of them.
Well, that's certainly much better, but the official Dash wiki says "If that proposal is approved by at least 10% of the masternode network, then at the end of the month a series of "superblocks" will be created. At that time, the block rewards that were not paid out (10% of each block) will be used to fund approved proposals. The network thus funds itself by reserving 10% of the block reward for budget projects."
https://dashpay.atlassian.net/wiki/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=84672534Assuming that you're right and the wiki is wrong, well, that certainly alleviates most of my concern, although I have to wonder what threshold have to vote for it to be approved. I.e, what constitutes a quorum of voters -- how many masternodes have to participate in the voting, for a valid vote to be held? And are votes carried over to the next month if they aren't decided?
For that matter, there should be 3 options for voters -- YES, NO, and ABSTAIN -- where ABSTAIN voluntarily removes that voter from being counted YES or NO, and thereby reduces the number of votes necessary for a quorum (however defined). In this way, voters can express either a "don't care" opinion (thus voluntarily giving others the power to choose) or a "recusing myself from a conflict of interest" vote.
He is indeed right and the wiki is wrong--or not clearly worded, anyway. I wrote that page, so it's my bad, and I've now edited it for clarity:
*The actual calculation is (YES VOTES - NO VOTES) > (Total Number of Masternodes 10)
I should also point out that the only money that the development team gets is the "Core Team Salary" amount, which is 1176 DASH per month split between about 18 people. In the past, it was split evenly, such that everybody got about 80 DASH per month. Even at today's near ATH prices, that's still only $1760 per month, or $21,120 per year...hardly enough to enrich anybody, given that it's about a fifth of what a dev would make working in the private sector. I don't know how many votes Evan has, but if we just assume 100 (nice round number), then the ANNUAL payout he receives is about 1% of his holdings. In other words, practically a rounding error. (Recently the pay structure has changed, and depending on time worked and value of contributions, Core Team members are paid between $250 and $2000 per month, irrespective of exchange rate.)
We *do* have an internal policy that Core Team members may not submit budget proposals to pay themselves for their Core work or any "side projects" that they do. If I get paid as part of the Core Team to write/edit, I can't submit a budget proposal to earn money for helping Amanda write the script for her Dash Detailed show, for instance. Finally, you have to remember that privacy is still one of Dash's core features, and thus there is no way to know for certain how many masternodes a person controls (if they are careful when starting masternodes and when voting). Unless they decide to tell us, nobody knows for sure how much voting power the so-called "elites" possess, so there is no way to know how to "penalize" their votes, or which votes to "exclude." You can't really say "Evan can't vote on Core Team proposals" when nobody knows which masternodes are Evan's! He could voluntarily abstain, but nobody can actually police it.
P.S. You are right about the "rinse and repeat" nature of all our previous visits above 0.02. If I had followed that strategy (sell above 0.02, but below 0.012) I'd have a fortune now. If you really believe in the future of Dash, though, you have to assume that one of these days we'll pass 0.02...and never look back. I've always been terrified of missing the train when it left the station, so I've never sold. For what it's worth, this guy has some great points (and he's not wrong very often):
https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/dash-entering-long-term-bull-market.13204/