I highly support the lean client effort, but I can not support this proposal.
Firstly, I am very excited about the aspects of the lean client and absolutely support your work. From what it sounds like, it’s great work and I highly commend all that has gone into it. Out of all of the initiatives out there to improve network efficiently, I currently lean heavily towards the lean client approach. It could allow scaling without having to change the balance of the protocol.
That said, I cannot support this proposal and here are a few main reasons:
Reason 1
While an innovative client is worth rewarding, we can’t disproportionately reward client work from 3rd parties over the innovations of core-devs. The reason more the core-dev team has not been pushing for more v0 client work is because they are focused primarily on v1. If the value of a new v0 client is worth $2M, then why would core-devs be motivated to work for PNI on v1? This would signal that two months of development on v0 outside of PNF is worth a 10 year salary.
Using this way of measuring value, I think with the amount of expertise, man hours, and overall network impact of v1 would peg individual core-devs with a value upwards of $50M each. Thats not a sustainable evaluation in any ecosystem.
We can’t create an alternative economy within Pocket where devs are incentivized to focus on massive DAO rewards over working at PNI. Core-devs have created are underpaid compared to what is being asked of the DAO. I do not see how that is sustainable as it create counter incentives within the same ecosystem.
I believe that the lean client work should be rewarded, and I’m totally fine adding rewarding premiums for it’s value to the network and for saving PNI resources from being taken away from v0, but we can’t use DAO grants to disproportionately reward 3rd parties disproportionately to the work happening at PNI. That logic just isn’t sustainable.
The DAO’s treasury at current market value is $12.5M, so if the DAO is willing to pay about 1/6 of it’s total funds for the lean client, then how much should v0 devs be paid? These numbers are just not sustainable.
Reason 2
We need to treat proposals equally as a community. The POKT Lint proposal was give a lot of pressure from a member of this proposal team to justify and quantify the value of that proposal. Prior to that proposal, value was more generalized for each proposal, but there was now pressure get more specific with quantifying it’s value, even though it was a reimbursement.
I receded that proposal in it’s current state to created a Proposal Value Model as to address quantifying value of proposals. It’s been reviewed by many DAO members and @noproblem has used it in his pokt.tools proposal as a trail run. Once pokt.tools is finished with the feedback phase and it’s up for vote, then I plan to re-submit POKT Lint using the Proposal Value Model.
We need to have consistency with how we expect proposal team to value their proposal. We can’t require some proposal teams to quantify value in very specific terms and include man hours, while other proposal teams can be very abstract and subjective.
Reason 3
Since the lean client is reliant on PNI’s core-devs to properly QA and verify that it will be health for the network, I’d prefer that it be approved and open-sourced before we vote on this proposal. This proposal is unique since it does require PNI to help ensure it’s safety. If the core-dev team approves it, then I am stoked and would love and reward the this team. Even if it’s not approved, then I still think that the team should be rewarded for the time and effort.
TLDR
Big fan of the work and hope it succeeds, though I feel the value of this proposal is too abstract/subjective (leading to over value) and can create incentives for core-devs to focus on grants for large rewards over working v1 with PNI. This proposal also does not quantify value to the same standard that has been put on past proposals. The timing is too early as PNI has not yet released their review regarding it’s feasibility/safety.