@RTTI-5220

setup is a 4/4 threshold multisig configuration, intricately designed to govern a pure proxy that's strictly limited to governance actions. design ensures an immutable constraint: the KSM funds allocated for governance experimentation cannot be reallocated, transferred, or otherwise utilized outside the scope of submitting Governance-type transactions.

by voting yes to this proposal, stakeholders are doing trade-off: the relinquishment of the conventional slashing deterrent against proposers in favor of amplifying experimental governance ventures. This exchanges posits trust in individual participants within the multisig(4/4 treshold config) over slashing mechanism, emphasizing the reliance on the due diligence and integrity of at least one of these individuals to vet proposals responsibly.

for me personally, the prospect of slashing event transform into a matter of reputational stake. inherent design here implicitly trusts at least one participants judgement and ethical conduct. i do agree that it would be way better to have real sponsor to deposits from their own bag and having skin in the game for doing that, but there has not been much of any upside/incentive for doing that.

@RTTI-5220

Thanks for your comment Raul! Tommi had some good words regarding the incentive tradeoff. KSM holders agree to remove slashing as a deterrent in exchange for a Treasury funded program that can sponsor large DDs. If we sponsor a malicious referendum our reputations will be tarnished, so that replaces the disincentive of slashing. Plus, a slash effectively terminates this experiment so it does protect against perpetually sponsoring malicious referenda. However this relies on the trust people have in the four signatories listed - it's assumed that we care about our reputation and will act with integrity. So it's up to voters to decide if this tradeoff is sound.

Regarding using a proxy - we are! The beneficiary of this spend is a governance pure proxy of the multisig, here's the transaction in which we made the pure proxy: https://kusama.subscan.io/multisig_extrinsic/21680238-5?call_hash=0xb27e08e28211f7f48a3b1eb3227b17da837d5dd06e482cca81ff5d36a17ed4a8.

@Otar

Thanks for the comment Otar. I agree that the long term solution is to enable crowdfunding DDs. However, I don't think this feature is a priority in the Fellowship and no one to date has made an RFC (or PR/issue in the SDK) to get the ball rolling. Maybe there's a plan to implement this feature that I'm unaware of, but from where I'm sitting it doesn't look like it'll be shipped any time soon.

Hopefully by the time this experiment is complete, this crowdfunding of DDs will be a new feature of openGov!

@mrb

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I do apologize if I don't exude a rock n' roll vibe, but I am quite excited about this initiative! Otherwise I wouldn't have revived the idea from when I first proposed it last November.

As far as determining what is/isn't malicious, that will still be KSM voters. Sure if this referendum passes we'll be able to place big DDs, but that doesn't mean we will alter a referendum's pass or fail outcome. So while we might think something is/isn't malicious, KSM holders can always disagree with us and place DDs/vote accordingly.

Regarding my referendum killer, remember that I didn't think burning the Treasury was malicious in and of itself. It was that Decent Partners proposed it out of spite when his ridiculous funding request started getting heavy NAYs. It was the fact that he was asking for funds while also proposing to burn the Treasury simultaneously that made me determine it was malicious. DP's proposal to burn the Treasury was guised "in real insight" when in reality it was just a giant F.U. to everyone NAYing DP's funding request. So while you may think I'm too conservative, I am very open to forthright chaotic experiments.

you can crowdsource DD contributions without some new tools

I have yet to see anyone achieve this. The Kusama ecosystem is small and rallying people to send enough of their KSM to some greater cause is incredibly difficult. If you can pull it off, I'd love to see it! Ultimately, funding a DD sponsor doesn't discourage holders to put their skin in the game - anyone will still be free to place DDs if they don't want to appeal to this sponsor.

what are the sorts of experimental ideas you want to see tested via root?

As stated in the proposal, this is a passive program. We aren’t asking people to step up with specific ideas - we are just trying to establish a resource for those who have their own ideas. As a DD sponsor, I don’t think it would be appropriate for us to encourage or discourage referenda since that would centralize the source of inspiration. I believe the community is quite capable of determining what kind of ideas to push using this resource. The only goal is to encourage people to put their ideas on chain knowing there’s recourse for large DDs.

Kusama has been kicking all this time yet we don’t see people encouraging wild ideas, submitting chaotic referenda on chain, or rallying huge DDs. As someone who actually did this with referendum 235, it was very discouraging when my wild idea to reconfigure spending track params via a non-Fellowship referendum got NAY’d and criticized by the Fellowship. And it never would have come to that reckoning if the Virto team didn’t place the DD; it was a deus ex machina. There’s no chance I’d ever want to try something like that again unless I knew a program like this sponsor existed; because why would I put in so much work just for a referendum to timeout and be disregarded by everyone? But that’s just my personal experience.

If you’d like to mint and distribute those soulbound NFTs and somehow bake cultural significance into them, I’d love to see it. Hell, I’d even vote to fund it! But for now, this referendum is what is immediately actionable. It might not be the perfect solution, but we shouldn't sacrifice tangible good for intangible perfection.

@Adam_Clay_Steeber

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I do apologize if I don't exude a rock n' roll vibe, but I am quite excited about this initiative! Otherwise I wouldn't have revived the idea from when I first proposed it last November.

To reiterate I like the idea. I also think the idea to introduce a referendum track to pay the DD is good.

Lets stick to debating the merits of the approach rather than more negative stuff, there's a vanishingly small kusama community, so it'd better to figure things out together since no-one can possibly have anything close to a full picture.

As far as determining what is/isn't malicious, that will still be KSM voters.

So can you be clear that the role of the multisig is not to make judgement calls in what is/isn't malicious?

For example, were this to pass, we may well submit a new proposal to:

• burn the kusama treasury
• introduce 'pallet mint' into the runtime
• note this would also require setting up the incoming treasury income to burn rather than pool into a treasury that is in our view a design that can be improved - the current structure tends to create peverse psychological incentives on both proposers and voters.

Right now, I am still unsure how apolitical your stance is, especially since you have previously attempted to 'kill' exactly this proposal.

It was that Decent Partners proposed it out of spite when his ridiculous funding request started getting heavy NAYs. It was the fact that he was asking for funds while also proposing to burn the Treasury simultaneously that made me determine it was malicious.

This was not a kneejerk reaction. We have also previously attempted to burn KappaSigmaMu's pot which continues to stack up and is unusable.

This is what concerns me with an apolitical structure, having a political dimension. What assurances can you provide?

Kusama has been kicking all this time yet we don’t see people encouraging wild ideas, submitting chaotic referenda on chain, or rallying huge DDs. As someone who actually did this with referendum 235, it was very discouraging when my wild idea to reconfigure spending track params via a non-Fellowship referendum got NAY’d and criticized by the Fellowship.

We agree whole-heartedly.

if you’d like to mint and distribute those soulbound NFTs and somehow bake cultural significance into them, I’d love to see it. Hell, I’d even vote to fund it!

As you wish :)

@mrb

I suppose no one can be totally apolitical since we all have our biases. The only real assurance I can give you is that, given the structure of the program, my duty is to confer with the other signatories on all requests. They are there to mitigate any personal biases I have so I hope they would help me make impartial and dispassionate decisions.

You have to understand that by placing the DD on referenda, we are staking our reputations. It's absolutely reasonable to think burning the Treasury is malicious behavior despite the genuine and critical arguments in favor for it; while you might not agree with that, you do recognize that, right? By sponsoring a referendum we are telling everyone: "we believe this should be executable on a winning vote," so such a statement about a perceived threat can be very damaging to our reputation. We must be mindful of that.

I'll be more specific by addressing one of your examples. Adding pallet::mint to the relay chain's runtime goes completely against what the Joe Petrowski is trying to lead the Fellowship on - minimize relay chain features outside of security & consensus. We have to remain as harmonious with the Fellowship as possible because it is a major resource for determining the technical direction of Kusama & Polkadot. However, if there is reason to believe that the Fellowship is stonewalling a reasonable idea, then this sponsor can help users circumvent the Fellowship on runtime-related changes.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that sometimes it's really hard to determine what is or isn't malicious. That is why we have 4 well-intentioned ecosystem agents on the multisig to help figure that out together. At the end of the day you're voting on our unanimous discretion.

I apologize if my views, or the views of the other signatories, are not as apolitical as you'd like. That's why I encourage other coalitions to propose funding a multisig-managed sponsor of their own! I would love to see a bunch of these kind of sponsors get funded by the Treasury so people have a robust selection of DD recourse to choose from.

@JelliedOwl

Excellent idea! Please be sure to submit a formal RFC to ensure that the Fellowship gets on top of adding such a track. In my experience, if it's not an immediate priority then they won't implement it very quickly (or at all). So in the meantime this sponsor can handle DD requests.

I can assure you, getting that track into a Kusama runtime upgrade is an order of magnitude more complicated, both technically and socially, than messing about with multisigs. It's the shortest path to any kind of solution to this specific problem.

@AdamClaySteeber My comment wasn't intended as an attack — sorry if my wording was poor.  I was thinking about raising an RFC, but I couldn't decide if it was "big enough" to warrant it.

This one — though I did find someone to put up the deposit in the end (it would have been quicker if I hadn't had to wait).
https://kusama.polkassembly.io/referenda/213

I assume this one doesn't have access to a deposit:
https://kusama.polkassembly.io/referenda/338

And there have been other para ID-related proposals that seem to have struggled to find deposits in the past.  Some of these might be resolve now - I was expecting to need a root referendum to retire paraId 2268 in the face of a lock, but it had been cleared by a recent update.

Not sure about non-para id related ones.

@METASPAN anything is open for people to request DDs so I can't enumerate all possible referenda that could be endorsed, but I can give a few examples.

• Para id stuff (as mentioned by JelliedOwl). Parachain teams can certainly appeal to us!
• forceTransfer of funds lost by earnest accident (with verifications of course)
• Trivial runtime changes being ignored by the Fellowship
• Staking reconfigurations
• Cancelling/killing a referendum
• Housekeeping (cleaning up bounty spam, clearing up unnecessary storage)
• Preimage requests
• Scheduler experiments

Some of these don't require root but any referendum on any track can be sponsored by this program. I hope this gives you a better idea. Ultimately, we aren't going to encourage any initiatives - we'll simply let community members decide what to request sponsorship for. As long as it's a reasonable proposal and the funds aren't tied up in other DDs, I don't see us denying sponsorship.

@jelliedowl @asteeber

Thanks for the examples.

This initiative is highlighting an underlying problem with the "cost of doing business" (i.e. making decisions) for the chain:

> Why is it so expensive to put certain decisions to a vote?

TBH, I was undecided on this one, and I still don't see the full usecase...

What's the risk? GBP 125k funds being mismanaged by 5 people who are well known to the community — quite low, they would be toasted!

I will support this as the funds will return to the treasury at the end of the experiment, (and the operators are not asking for any remuneration for their time)

We are the canary chain after all..!