Thanks @crabman . As to current market conditions, I have gone ahead and updated the budget to cap the funding in case the price stays below $0.05. As indicated above , there was absolutely no intention on my part to try to “time the market”. As to waiting to ask when things are not this gloomy… I suppose that’s a matter of perspective. Other than depressed price, I think a lot is currently going right for this project.
As I said above, I’m at a natural transition point between focusing on v0 and v1 so it made sense to close out the previous chapter now.
Thanks for the response. Happy to better communicate with the following:
No intention to create an unfair bias. I would encourage anyone to look at the feedback I provided on the GRIP Discord. I basically copy and pasted the relevant parts from the convo over here.
You did indeed make a lot of changes, especially with added references to each of your claims. I greatly appreciated that as it makes looking back at this work much more straightforward. Folks are welcome to review the GRIP Discord for feedback, and they will see you did make many worthy changes to the format and sources.
Thank-you for that
My opinion may differ here from yours… but if someone is proposing that the DAO invest into significant code changes to the protocol, then I think it’s fair that the DAO put resources into vetting it. Personally, that sounds like a good process to me.
My research was the catalyst to GOOD VIBES not going through… and I would have been happy to see the DAO first sanction the research as a matter of a due diligence process, instead of just on my own dime at the last minute So may just be a difference of opinion here.
SER was your eco proposal that passed, so that make sense for it to be a reimbursement. ACCURATE and FREN were @Cryptocorn, so if there is to be evaluation for your contributions, then it should be in respect to the evaluation of the the original author IMO. That’s why I think a single proposal is better, so the evaluation of value is the same
Regarding the work you did for PNF, that could be reimbursed by the DAO or PNF could compensate. Not sure… but my point was that SER has strong standing for sure.
Personally, it gets too confusing if I need to consider someone else’s salary or theoretic holdings to evaluate another’s proposal. I also believe your salary outside of POKT should not be a factor in the evaluation of your work. That is just my opinion.
Overall, thanks for response and providing your perspective on my comments
Do you plan to charge the DAO for this v1 research you are starting? If so I would suggest putting up a per-approval proposal that has specific guidelines and deliverables. Or something like an RFP.
I don’t believe the reimbursement proposal structure for R&D work should be continued in the future IMO.
As I mention above, I plan to request a POP from the PNF under the new GROW initiative once that gets rolled out in a few weeks as that bypasses a lot of the funding friction for cases such as mine. If that goes through, then I do not foresee any new funding request directly to the DAO You will note that the budget of this proposal for the 7-8 months of contribution are fairly in line with the POP monthly budgets Perhaps I should have used that as an evaluation methodology. eg “what compensation would have been provided had this been funded via a POP” That initiative is just rolling out and did not exist in the past for me to utilize.
I can consider an RFP as well, and there is a specific DNA point this can be pursued under. However, it should be noted that just as with the scorecard, the RFP is designed more for “public goods” not so much for straight-up R&D - e.g., if I collab with PoktScan to build a radCAD sim model for POKT, that would likely be pursued via an RFP as that is more of a “public good”.
If neither of these routes prove to be viable I would plan to seek funding directly from the DAO, in which case, I am happy to go through a pre-approval process for anticipated v1 work such as you suggest.
I totally get the ideal of separate proposal for each of these actions. Just seems impractical to accomplish in this case. Let’s wait and see what the other feedback is like. If there seems to be solid consensus that a merged funding request is preferable, then I can consult with @cryptocorm and @caesar (who provided the comparison analysis for SER) to see how to merge their contributions (that have not already been compensated via PEP51 in to this proposal.
[Also, to be fair, ACCURATE was two separate proposals that got merged, mine and cryptocorn. I did the merging, final writing and the analysis to justify both parts; just a matter of deference on my part to list cruptocorn first; order should not really matter for the purpose of this discussion]
Good for now, I value my time a bit differently and fortunately I don’t need a consensus there. Have given a significant amount of my personal time to Pocket (excluding public TG channels), that only a few are aware of. But that was my choice and will continue to be so (whenever/if ever).
Firstly, it’s a shame that people are attacking someone requesting payment for putting in hundreds of hours of work. You can question how many of the hours should be paid, and at what value, but there seems to be a correlation between people who’ve never helped the Ecosystem and just complain, usually without really understanding Pocket or people’s contributions, and people not wanting contributors who do the hard work they can’t be arsed to, getting paid.
I’ve worked with MSA on several of the above proposals, and found his work helpful and insightful.
In reference to my PEP asking to be compensated, in hindsight I asked for too little (some negative advice I took). While I don’t mind being paid less than minimum wage for some of my work - we shouldn’t expect all contributors to expect pennies.
MSA did the bulk of the work on the eventual FREN, SER and ACCURATE. He should definitely be paid for this time and effort, which led to major inflation reduction that seems to be the hot topic de jour.
In hindsight, MSA and I (+ Caeser) should have made a joint proposal for the multiple inflation reduction proposals. I agree that moving forward joint proposals covering the whole compensation request should be standard.
How exactly to measure the ROI/Impact and pay, other hours requested, I don’t know. MSA should be paid for the proposals at the very least, and for some of his other efforts to do the hard work in our ecosystem. I’d like to see MSA work through a socket going forward so we don’t have these acrimonious debates going forward.
I’m not against rewarding work done, but I think that the requested amount is too high. The requested amount for 7 months of work is far higher than the amount requested by @Cryptocorn for 12 months of work.
I feel that the argumentation around the “technical skill” is not solid, as I stated before in the CARE thread the compensation should be to the perceived value of the contribution not making distinction on whether it was technical or not. Also, and since GRIP was mentioned in the initial post, there is no difference in paid amounts to different GRIP members. Regardless of their skills or certifications, everyone is paid the same as they are perceived to be apt by the community.
Regarding the worked ours, I feel that the proposer is claiming too many worked hours. There are a total of 586 claimed hours, that means that in the last 7 months the proposer worked more than 20 hours a week, that’s quite a lot and even more when considering periods like Sep-Nov.
I certainly find it difficult to believe that in the 2 months that the PUP-25 was active the proposer spent 1.25 months of full dedication to it (calculating 195 hours at 40 hours per week). This is in fact more than what I (the author of the proposal) dedicated to it. Finally, and just to leave a note on the value that the proposer claim to have provided to PUP-25, I don’t believe that it was an accurate analysis (refer to this post for more information).
Thanks @RawthiL for your input. A couple considerations
If you see @Cryptocorn 's post just prior to yours he indicates his ask may have been too little and should not be used as precedence for future proposals.
Understood. Everyone in GRIP gets paid $100. That’s all I’m asking for in this proposal. $100/hr, or even slightly less, for the work shown in Table 1 only that led to direct DAO action. Nothing in addition to that for anything in Table 2 and Table 3, which are shown for supplemental purposes and only factor into the fourth evaluation methodology labeled " Using an hourly contract model"
Isn’t this exactly in line with the valuation method PoktScan used for the geomesh proposal, where DAO reimbursed PoktScan for everyone from development to documentation and support at $100. Isn’t that more recent precedence than CARE. I didn’t see PoktScan slash their budget to 1/8th its original ask because CARE set precedence that “equal pay” dictates that everyone in the ecosystem get paid at $12/hr.
If one uses the idea that only contributions that lead directly to DAO/PNF action should be compensated, then I think that my budget and the CARE budget are more in line that you think. If one takes the $7k budget of CARE and scale it up by the ratio of hours I put into FREN/ACCURATE/SER to his, I think you would get very close to my ask amount.
Pretty close. A bit under 20hr/wk actually (closer to 8 months than 7 is covered), but correct, pokt has been a rather major focus of my attention.
yeah, I pretty much shut down everything else going on in my life during that month or so to concentrate on this issue.
This is rather to be expected. It is much more difficult to try to reverse engineer, reproduce and troubleshoot an analysis than it is to do the original. Plus I acknowledged that the hours shown include some ancillary work such as providing analysis for the third-party bin-equivalence experiment that was being conducted concurrently and being discussed in the comments thread of the proposal.
Yes. Duly noted. I’d be happy to debate if ever needed in the future, but once PoktScan signaled their intention to discontinue pursuing the proposal (which did not occur until after the time period in which I provided my independent analysis) I stopped all further work on the subject.
All that being said, let’s not loose focus that this PUP25 analysis is not part of my Table 1 contributions that form the primary basis for my reimbursement request; it only factors in as supplemental consideration.
The impact scorecard is a tool to support sensemaking about specific parts of the proposal and the impact they created, and to highlight where people might have differing opinions. It was not designed with this specific use case in mind but I think it illuminates some areas which seem to be lost from this discussion, notably that there was “some” impact from effort expended by MSA (and others)
Retroactive requests will always be subjective which is why we are implementing new mechanisms that will for the most part avoid this or create more incentive for reaching agreement before work starts. PNF will make a forum post soon with some further principles re funding and pricing which we can all debate and discuss. So let’s keep the focus here on a question of was there impact and what is the right reward for effort expended
Adding some comments as an everyday POKT person and observer:
I would say 90% of DAO participants and voters have not (will never) read this thread start to finish. Look at how long it is. Let’s be pragmatic and just summarise the current state of this debate:
Mostly agreed on some impact from MSA work
Not much agreement on the right size/price
A simple way forward is to just do a signalling or strawpoll vote of different pricing sizes so MSA has some clarity on the tradeoffs of moving forward in current form or whether to adjust. This could probably achieve more in 2 days than the collective effort of more weeks of reading, replying, debating.
In my opinion we really need a better logic around how these discussions roll out. Here’s my mental model for gating each step towards supporting something. It’s maddening to me that we are aligned on 80% of something and get ourselves in a total mess over the 20% where we aren’t.
My mental gating:
Is this a need? Go to next step:
Is it a need now?
Is this the right solution?
Is this the right person?
Is this the right size?
Using this proposal as an example:
Is this a need? Yes, work was done that had some impact.
Is it a need now? Yes, stop kicking the can down the road with these things.
Is this the solution? There was no other mechanism at the time so suck it up and deal with it
Is this the right person? He did the work, maybe could have been combined with others but too late.
Is this the right size? No idea, let’s figure this bit out by seeing what people would say yes to as quick as humanly possible and get it done.
In response to MSA’s request for help from GRIP with this proposal, he was advised that “your request for reimbursement will have more legs if in addition to identifying what you deem to be your contribution, you provide evidence to back up the usefulness/value of that contribution. Depending on the contribution in question this could include data following implementation of your feedback that can only be due to your feedback, or, you can quote people in the know.”
Unfortunately, however, this proposal provides little if any evidence of value-add or benefit (as distinct from the author’s subjective view). No hard data appears to be provided. (Nor is anyone with recognized expertise cited in support.) Such information is an absolute necessity.
Any such impact needs to be articulated and assessed with rigor. The DAO should not pay after-the-fact for R&D work unless its positive impact is proven, clearly set out, and comprehensible (for those without economic expertise).
No. What counts is value-add.
R&D work should be pre-approved
In addition to leveraging GROW, MSA is welcome to join GRIP where he can be compensated for his economic analysis on the same footing as other qualified DAO members. This will standardize the process for compensating expert feedback. If MSA joins GRIP, people who want his feedback can request it in advance, rather than get it unsolicited and see him ask the DAO to pay for it after-the-fact.
Extraneous considerations
If MSA is seeking reimbursement only for work reflected in Table 1, Tables 2 and 3 are irrelevant. They should be removed from the PEP along with “Contribution Details for Table 2” and “Research Thread Details for Table 3."
Proposal Premature
The pre-proposal category is meant as a starting point for proposals in order to facilitate review and input from the entire community. Posting to the pre-proposal category usually leads to changes that make proposals better and more coherent. It’s a win-win for the author and the DAO. (While authors can ask GRIP to give feedback in the pre-proposal category, this is optional.)
With a straw poll now seemingly in the works, the compensation being sought by MSA’s proposal is up in the air. This proposal should have been submitted in the Forum as a pre-proposal first. The messy, contentious debate, the imminent straw poll, and the inevitable amendments could all have taken place prior to floating this PEP.
The rigor of articulation and assessment of impact that you call for is unprecedented in this ecosystem. There is not one other proposal - including the GRIP renewal proposal, for which this level of documentation and “proof of impact” has been offered or demanded.
The context of the original request for further documentation was to prove out that my personal contributions to the collaborative efforts of FREN/ACCURATE/SER were significant and essential, rather than ancillary, . I have more than adequately demonstrated this, and this has been further corroborated by @Cryptocorn 's own words stating that I did the bulk of the work on these proposals.
To go beyond this and try to quantify the impact of these DAO-approved changes is no more easily done than it would be for you to quantify the impact of the first three months of GRIP (which impact assessment you did not attempt to undertake), the impact of the Reddit efforts, the impact of CARE, the impact of Messari reports, etc. There is a subjective judgment call the DAO makes in such matters.
PNF’s impact scorecard in designed to help standardize this process and I refer back to this scorecard in considering the budget. However, this is not an exact science, not to mention that all the kinks of the PNF scorecard have not been worked out yet, so we are still left with a large degree of subjectivity. In this process, it is important to avoid double standards as pertains to burdens of proof, lest wildly disparate burdens of proof be used as back-channel mechanism to favor one set of contributors over another set of contributors, based on popularity, personal like or dislike, or any other non-merit-based factor.
I think it is self-explanatory that if the DAO votes to approve a change, it does so precisely because they feel it adds value; otherwise the voters would reject the change. Toward that end, having passed the proposals FREN, ACCURTE and SER, the question is not if value was added, but how much. While the answer to that is subjective; I have attempted to utilize the PNF scorecard as an imperfect step toward quantizing this value. The budget is consistent with the scorecard value.
Thank you for that invitation. This proposal is not about moving forward from here, but about reimbursement for past work. As stated earlier, GRIP was not inexistence or an option last fall. Nor was the concept or possibility of “pre-approving” an R&D endeavor.
Further, joining GRIP does not answer the question on how to compensation proposal authors for the analysis and work that goes into shaping a passing proposal. My argument is that if GRIP members get compensated at a certain rate to edit or provide expert analysis toward the shaping of the proposal, surely it is reasonable for the authors to get compensated similarly.
Table 1 is the primary consideration. Table 2 and 3 are supplemental factors only. Voters are free to ignore Tables 2-3 if they wish and consider the merits of the budget solely on the basis of Table 1.
I decline to remove Tables 2-3 as they are there more for the sake of the DAO than for my sake. Namely, the proposal, as written, sums up a body of work, and places a marker in time that says work spent through March 2023 on any of these areas is included and thus will never show up in the future on any other reimbursement request, even if some of the open issues eventually come to fruition. If the proposal were rewritten to reflect Table 1 only, then questions might arise as to whether or not I might in the future seek further reimbursement from this time period.
Perhaps posting in the pre-proposal category may have been better; my understanding was that shaping the draft in the GaG Discord was equivalent, but I understand your point.
Realistically, however, the exact same conversations and debates and opinions voiced on value or lack thereof would take place either way.
TL;DR
Value ultimately is in the eye of the beholder (voter); hence the vote. Some will see no or little value in the contributions, others will. That is what the vote will show.
PNF scorecard has been filled out and discussed with PNF to ensure the the budget is reasonable from a PNF perspective.
In assessing subjective value, multiple comps should be used for guidance. Focus should not rest on one single comp that is cherry-picked to build a case against this proposal. PEP-51 is a one-sided comparison seeing that the PEP-51 recipient himself acknowledged that the ask was way under market value and should not be used as precedence to bind future proposals.
Other comps that can be considered:
the budget is equivalent to the initial 3 months of GRIP plus two months of follow on.
the budget is equivalent to one Messari report
the budget is equivalent to 2/3 of the reimbursement given to me previously for work on PIP-22 and PUP-21
the budget is same ball park but a bit higher than the budget of Reddit over the same period
the budget is approximately 2% of what the DAO just spent/committed for three v0-only solutions that do not carry forward into v1
The question for DAO voters is how this current body of work - primarily Table 1 and the driving of emissions from the 50% inflation narrative of last August to single digits by one year later - stacks up in value compared to these other initiates. If it stacks up favorably, a “yes” vote is warranted. If it does not, a “no” vote is warranted.
I have updated the budget of this proposal to $13k USD, down from the original ask of $23k and down from the approximate $19k reimbursement that would have resulted from implementing a cap on the original budget.
The reduced budget accounts for questions that arose during discussion regarding the scope of work being reimbursed as well as to be sensitive to the weakness in $POKT price in recent weeks/months.
Big NO vote for this proposal. No need for this, excuse me for being so direct.
SER is about to be replaced soon, so much unnecessary funds were spent on it. With all the respect, you are selling unnecessarily complex models to POKT which aren’t solving any of the core issues and still charging ridiculous rates for expensive fictive working hours. DAO recognized it and rejected you already, it’s worrisome that you are still coming back asking for a reimbursement. DAO cannot be fooled anymore like it was the case last year. Just my 2 pokt.
Hope this gets approved! Especially now that you cut the ask in half.
Going through some of the history and comments, my view is that MSA is being treated quite unfairly, and at times straight-up bad. It’s apparent that if anything, the system/structure is (was) at fault, and not the person. As far as I’ve seen he’s just done what was asked of him at the time, and generally what I’ve seen tremendous value has been added economically, even though some might be indirect. Some of the issues being addressed are highly complex and innovative. Naturally, the value can’t always be quantifiable, and there will be hit-and-miss sometimes. But to then go ahead and not pay people after the work has been done when they’ve followed the guidelines to the best of their ability is a terrible sentiment to set. This won’t exactly motivate new people to try and contribute.
Hope the proposal passes, and also that there are clearer rules/guidelines for competent contributors going forward.
So may just be a difference of opinion here.