Just to be clear, I'm not against the bounty itself I would support it 100% if it had different Curators (they know who they are). It seems like the ecosystem system keeps rewarding backstabbing. Plenty of good people in the ecosystem should get a chance to contribute.

Hey Will,

Thank you for posting the proposal. The proposal audit overview is noted below.

Please note the Audit report is reflecting only the quality of information presented in the proposal and not the Quality of the project/idea itself.

Full Audit

The following proposal Audit is created as a part of Proposal #67.More information about Treasury proposal template and the Audit process can be found on the link above. All templates are free for everyone to use. For any questions or feedback regarding the Audit templates use discussion link from above.

Please note that views and opinions presented in the Audit report are my personal and they do not represent general community opinion. PS. I am using Crust network as ecosystem solution for the storage. Please let me know if the files/links are unavailable.

This could be a fine short term solution but we really should try to figure a long term solution during those 6 months.

I recognise most of these collators to also be validators on Kusama, and I believe that we, as a network, have been accommodating to validators, especially with the recent introduction of the 10% minimum commission. I would assume that under the $34/KSM price point taken for the 10% min. commission argument, the collators in question are running a small profit from their validator operations.

Regarding collators, I see them as a bit of a charity project at the moment and hope that we can implement better long-term solutions. Personally, I find the idea of supporting a specific validator on Kusama by running a collator at a loss compelling. In this way, collators could be supported through the validation efforts (marketing potential for validators).

The proposal actually covers a pretty big time frame as it includes retroactive payments (12 months) as well as the 6 month future payments.

On a separate note, I would have appreciated greater transparency regarding your personal financial interest in this proposal as a collator.

I intend to vote "nay" on this proposal.

Whilst I agree in principal with collators for system parachains not running at a loss - I think we need to take a harder look at the number of collators actually required to provide the necessary censorship resistant characteristics we're after.

On Basilisk and HydraDX we run ~20 collators and this is somewhat higher than many others - I'm not sure that we can say e.g. Statemine needs 20 collators. I would also argue that all system parachains are not equal - 20 collators for e.g. Encointer would be crazy, whereas can easily be argued for the Bridge Hub.

We should also be mindful of # collators (and quality) needed for e.g. Kusama (ded chain) vs Polkadot - Statemint with the coming DEX and integrations with e.g. Circle, Binance, whoever could easily command a decentralised set of professional collators.

I'm extracting some outrageous points for discussion on the main thread just to address them openly.

There were two statements made against the Curators, one issued by Vegas and another issued by Gabriel (now corrected). I am speaking in favour of these individuals; they are each hard working, honest and they have an on-chain record of service. Please put aside personal grievances and keep this factual. To Gabriel's first statement that is now corrected, neither of the Curators are Collators or Validators.

The proposal actually covers a pretty big time frame as it includes retroactive payments (12 months) as well as the 6 month future payments.

On a separate note, I would have appreciated greater transparency regarding your personal financial interest in this proposal as a collator.

The budget is imo very clear and the recipients are well identified. May I ask, what more would you like? Is the "your" referring to me personally? If so why am I singled out?

Stake Plus is one of the affected collators (beneficiary of this proposal) and also the biggest voter on this track by far (delegated votes with a 70,000KSM weight).

Thus a large part of the current votes are controlled by the affected parties of this proposal (70% with Stake Plus alone if we assume a turnout of 100k KSM) which is rather alarming!

As someone building on Statemine(a use-case of the Virto tech) and planning to run a collator in a poorly covered region this would be beneficial, however I'm not so sure we need this when there's already something like bounty 19 for the infrastructure builders program that from what I understand would already reward collators of the common good chains that achieve certain milestone in the professional track(I'm actually looking forward to participate in the program :))

When you put collators of the program that should be spread around the globe, plus existing ones that already have other means of financing I think we are left with a decent amount(at least for now), remember that collators don't provide security(a single collator can keep things running perfectly fine) and our current user base and the load of a network like Statemine is quite low to need massive infrastructure(dare I say, the usage of the entire Polkadot+Kusama ecosystem is so low that a few nodes in a single parachain would probably handle everything just fine ;P).

As a member of the IBP, where we already host boot and rpc nodes for all common good parachains, I would prefer to see this included in IBP. I will abstain on this one.

Hi @@olanod and @derekc ,

I appreciate the invitation and suggestion of including this under the IBP. While I am sure existing collators would all appreciate receiving grants ($15k+$15k) for hardware, I think there's better value attained from the proposed model. The IBP is afaik designed to fund parties for provision of RPC and Bootnodes (Infrastructure) and not for collation on said chains.

As it relates to selection of members, existing members were selected in a permission-less manner and the proposal seeks to elect collators by means of governance (see section 4.5). Imposing members of the IBP as collators is certainly something that is not desired. Members of the IBP are free to participate and I'm sure a decentralized use-case would speak to their favour.

The proposal speaks towards the determination of the ideal number of Collators and what we are trying to achieve with the framework. You are correct that the security of the network is provided by the relay-chain and the ideal number of Collators is unknown. As I responded to lolmcshizz, we are following guidance from SR Labs and they suggested 20.

Just for general clarity, if there are 2 collators on Statemine and a block time of 12s, if one should fail then the block time increases to 24s. Stretching this to 20 collators, if one collator fails then the block time is 12.6s. There are also other considerations why 'a few' may not be desired which are again all discussed in the proposal.

Please note that the bounty was approved but the curators were not assigned. To assign curators the bounty must first be funded, the funding of the bounty actually occurs per-spend-period and not immediately upon approval.