Responding to Christopher Conforti (Re: DAO organization on Discourse, BBS, and related posts)

[mbr]

@ccc

In order to make DeFi less scary, we need to simplify its presentation, and that means abstracting, which means developing a vocabulary of metaphor and symbology that can be used to explain the system to anyone in a way that is intuitive. Simpler is better; this is the key to getting DeFi adopted beyond people who are already on the cutting edge of finance

I agree in principal. Language is a hard thing to control, and the community largely creates its own words to define concepts. A good example is the word stake, used as a verb. This is a DeFi word, now.

[mbr]

@ccc

It’s also important to remember that I don’t own anything that Google lets me use for free; this has vast implications for the concept of ownership. I like owning my data, and I think that the DAO should own its data too. And frankly it would be a waste of my time to understand whatever legalese (or otherwise) through which Google expresses that relationship, because it almost certainly means that I own nothing.

Or openOffice, or whatever. I just used Google docs as an example. If you want, you could write it all in the terminal and save the binary.

[ccc]

It’s interesting how we differ in our forum practices. You make a separate post for each individual point, while I tend to lump everything together into one massive post. Your approach has advantages… I may experiment with that in the future–also I fear I annoy people with my massive walls of words.

@mbr

In any case, the overheads are small for the 3rd party, as they only pay the incentive effectively once. If ourproject supported this sort of thing natively, the overheads are prohibitively high.

Upon consideration of this argument, I now agree. I sometimes forget that doing things like this, even if we’re creating it from nothing (well, code), does have a cost even if it’s hidden in some way. (NOT intentionally, I would hope we’d never engage in such skulduggery!)

It must be remembered that nothing is created and nothing is destroyed–complex things are only de- and recomposed; value cannot spring from nothingness.

@mbr

At the moment, governance is an opt-in process, and the protocol’s function for stakers is not intriniscally connected to their dedication to DAO operations. To connect the two is essentially the same as making DAO participation mandatory, which has some pretty severe trade-offs. This is probably a subject better suited to its own thread.

I somewhat disagree. Active participation in governance is indeed opt-in, but if I stake BNT, I automatically receive vBNT. I don’t have to do anything with it, but just having it automatically connects me–if indirectly, perhaps–to DAO participation; I have vBNT that exists and is not voting, and that is a well-established form of participation in the DAO–abstention (even unintentional). I agree, though, that this particular topic is best left to discussion in its own thread.

@mbr

Just for clarity, the rewards you are referring to, are inflationary (like LM), or derived from swaps, or other sources of revenue?

Any. I used “Sap” to distinguish the rewards from the other things conceptually, but frankly the model doesn’t deal with what Sap actually is or its origination, it only deals with it in the context of getting rewards to good voters. Sap–as well as Flow Governance–is a generic form, and we can (in theory, anyway) stick anything that emits money on to the back of it, then swap that out for something entirely different, and it shouldn’t look any different to the front end; the apparent functionality shouldn’t change when we change the parts feeding it. (Image if every time you changed battery brands in your car, you had to switch out the dashboard too; that’s what I want us to avoid)

I want to use the general ideas of both pure functional and generic programming (I dislike wikipedia but it’s most readily available) to build adaptable and easily-reconfigurable systems with small, standardized, discrete, modular parts. I think it’s a good way to conserve one of our most precious resources–developer hours.

@mbr

A good example is the word stake, used as a verb. This is a DeFi word, now.

I disagree; it is used frequently in DeFi and it has a specific meaning in our context, but even that still hearkens to the underlying meaning of the word: to nail something down, more or less permanently, presumably under the ownership of someone or for some purpose. That is what is happening when we stake our funds in an LP; we are nailing our money down to the pool so that it can be used for swaps. We did not change the meaning of the word simply by adopting it, we only added our specific context to its already vast library of contexts and have confused many people in the process.

@mbr

Language is a hard thing to control, and the community largely creates its own words to define concepts.

Again I disagree. Language is hard thing to master; we’re both controlling language as we speak. A large part of mastery of a language is managing its vocabulary and using it effectively. Not that it particularly demonstrates mastery, but it may prove the point: Instead of saying “I disagree”, I could just say “No”. Both equally valid, and both are more-or-less equal measures of control of a language. The former is objectively longer, but the latter would appear rude; that’s a subtlety of the vocabulary. Those kinds of subtleties make mastery of a language, and lead to things like diplomacy–effectively, the art of telling someone to get bent in such a way that they look forward to it, and one cannot do that without mastery of language on some level.

The overall point being, language is not difficult to control, and we can feasibly invest time into refining exactly how we use it with an expectation of producing a measurable and favorable result.

As for the community making its own words for DeFi; yes, that’s the problem. Just like scientists, I think we’re terrible at naming things; if I ask literally anyone I know what a “perpetual swap” is, their eyes glass over–should seem obvious, but you’d be surprised. Our vocabulary is familiar, but our usage of it is not, and that’s what’s “scary” about it.

We seem to just use whatever happens to stick the most, which usually seems to be whatever the person who made it called it (fair enough), rather than applying a methodology to that to reach a happy medium where everything is labelled (maybe even by their creators) and the labels are intuitive and easy to get because they follow well-defined rules. (Lojban is a constructed language that is very good at this; I’m not suggesting we use it [it’d be neat though] but the underlying concepts are worth noting.)

By the way, I’m not at all suggesting that I would be better at naming things; I think my approach may work better in terms of not confusing people (I find it’s easier to attach a new concept to a new word than it is to an existing word), but “everyone likes their own brand”, so I suppose that may not mean much.

@mbr

Or openOffice, or whatever. I just used Google docs as an example. If you want, you could write it all in the terminal and save the binary.

Does the majority of our team use Google Docs (or similar), or do they use OpenOffice (or similar)? (LibreOffice is better imho, btw)

People reach first for the easiest thing that does the job. It’s a perfectly natural thing, but it pays to be selective, and that’s not what I see in DeFi development. Obviously I want to make people’s jobs as easy as possible, so of course I’m not going to suggest they write their proposals in Assembler just so we don’t have to use dirty-nasty Google; that would be absurd. One must find suitable replacements, so instead of using Google Drive/Docs, one might use NextCloud, or get creative with an office suite and SyncThing, and I think LibreOffice has collaboration capabilities (never needed them yet, so I haven’t looked for them, but I heard something about that).