It’s a difficult sybil attack. They can’t make minipools except when above 10%.
The existing incentives to sybil far outweigh anything this proposal would do
2 Likes
I see it not so much as an attack but as a miss-alignment of the vote. Currently we have a pretty large block of the vote that is below 10% due to the perfect storm of bond reductions right before a ratio drop. But also fairly low prices which you would think would incentivize those nodes to get back to 10%. A hard cutoff at 10% isn’t a good idea for voting for the reasons listed above but I do intend to propose diminishing vote power below 10% if ‘All Nodes’ wins to maintain more of alignment with the protocol.
5 Likes
I only see options relating to node operators. Why not just anybody with RPL or rETH? Changes affect them as well. Or alternatively anyone with RPL or rETH but if you have minipools they act as a multiplier.
3 Likes
+1 to this idea of giving rETH holders the opportunity to vote. This may be a separate topic all together.
To start, yes I’m in agreement with Patches that “Whoever is a node operator should be able to vote.”.
Also, I support the idea of researching how to updating governance to give rETH holders voting power in some form.
If rETH holders have a vote in governance - Rocket Pool becomes the closest thing to am “enshrined ETH liquid staking” token given Vitalik’s latest research from my POV.
Per Vitalik’s latest thoughts - " There are other clever things that we can do with simple protocol tweaks. For example, imagine that we want a system where there are two “tiers” of staking: node operators (high collateral requirement) and depositors (no minimum, can join and leave any time), but we still want to guard against node operator centralization."
How to do this? “by giving a randomly-sampled committee of depositors powers like suggesting lists of transactions that have to be included (for anti-censorship reasons), controlling the fork choice during an inactivity leak, or needing to sign off on blocks.”
My bet is the best way to beat all other liquid staking competitors is to adapt the best governance to ensure 1) decentralization 2) everyone has a voice 3) accountability between node operators and liquid stakers. The growth will take care of it’s self if we can ensure the retail liquid stakers stake around for years and rETH to be adapted by into institutional investment as the safest ETH liquid staking token.
I also bet that Rocket Pool node operators would be open to slowly giving a fraction of their governance votes for measurable impact from rETH governance participants.
What do Rocket Pool node operators want to give up some governance power via measurable impact? I’m not sure. What do you think?
My own thoughts are that I would give up some governance power if rETH holders could help Rocket Pool become the public good ETH liquid staking protocol run/owned by the users and companies ensuring Ethereum remains decentralized, running 24/7/365 for decades ahead.
Thanks @hanniabu for coming back out of the woods to share your thoughts here and to inspire my own thoughts for the community.
2 Likes
Wholeheartedly agree that any RPL staked should be eligible to vote. I think having the RPL/ETH ratio impact governance voice is an unnecessary vulnerability towards censorship.
1 Like
Some thoughts from the outside view.
Most important point right now is that this resolves successfully. If I had voting power, I would be voting early, then checking back at ~2 days to go, and changing my vote if needed to try to ensure some positive outcome.
0 - 150% feels better because it doesn’t prevent NO’s from voting if they have dropped below 10%. Its hard enough to get vote participation anyway. This is a rule that has the potential to directly annoy NO’s that want to vote, when they discover that they can’t right now (and can’t fix it at this point due to the snapshot system).
0 - 150% also feels better because its less complicated. From an outside view, the overlap of various rules for voter eligibility looks overdesigned (though I’m aware its just inheriting complexity from the rewards system). Following on from this, I would also encourage removing the upper limit from voting power at some point in the future.
You only need one parameter to move between sybil-safety and plutocrat-safety (which are directly opposed), and its the exponent in the quadratic voting formula. Just reduce the cognitive load to ‘every NO can always vote’ and adjust the exponent as desired if you become more or less worried about sybils or plutocrats. It might even be possible to adjust the exponent automatically based on the gini index, or some other measure of inequality among node operators (at perfect equality, its 1:1 tokens to voting power, at high inequality the quadratic formula is much harsher to NO’s with more RPL.)
You also have the reward system to incentivise desired behaviour in node operators, you don’t need to do it with the voting system as well, vote power is a less effective incentive than rewards anyway.
3 Likes
The goal of these votes is not to set in a stone a way of doing governance forever, but to resolve the paradox we have right now:
- If <10% was always permitted to vote per RPIP-4, then we need to change the snapshot strategy to allow them to vote.
- If <10% was never permitted to vote per RPIP-4, then to answer @epineph 's proposal, we need a vote with the current snapshot strategy
- We don’t know what RPIP-4 enshrined because it isn’t worded very specifically, and people have interpreted it meaning different things.
Thus, we are simply voting with both strategies to determine which one is to be used for future votes, should both strategies agree. That way no reasonable person can claim that ongoing and future votes are illegitimate.
Future votes can add rETH holder voting power, or tweak the voting power for people under 10%, or whatever else you want to suggest- however, these are off-topic discussions in my view. Right now, we are focusing on bootstrapping governance into a usable state. It is currently not usable, so we currently can’t even vote to include rETH holders if we want to.
5 Likes
No I can’t because I didn’t top off by the snapshot. The last few votes show that I don’t have any voting power.
One of the two linked votes includes node below 10%.
If you can’t vote in either, then there’s a problem…
Agree with @LongForWisdom and others that the most important thing is to resolve this issue quickly, so governance is unblocked again.
To me, it’s always been clear that voting was intended to be effective-RPL only (10-150%). With the insights of today, I’m in favor of allowing all active Node Operators to vote (0-150%), so they don’t become disenfranchised entirely just through price action. But reaching a consensus is even more important to me.
It’s unfortunate that RPIP-4 was ambiguous on this subject, which was further muddied by the smart contracts not being implemented as they should have been.
Hopefully with this twin vote the will of the pDAO will be made explicitly clear and we’ll be able to move on.
3 Likes
I agree that coming to an agreement is really the most important goal in this vote.
However, I think that our haste must not result in a lesser security for a protocol. I feel 10-150 option is safer for governance. As it was said before, this vote is not final and we can always lower the governance bar later if we feel it’s safe and appropriate.
So I encourage you all to vote for a safer 10-150 option. Imagine the vote shall answer “What’s the least contentious safest option to unblock governance” instead of “Who should vote” ?
1 Like
I disagree. Voting is about expressing your ideology, your desires, your expected state.
If you simply pick whatever seems safest, you might as well just not vote. Because then you’re only a hanger-on and will be steam-rolled by the people who raise their voice the most.
I encourage everybody to always vote for whatever you want to become “law”. If it doesn’t matter to you, then abstain, but don’t just follow the masses like a braindead cultist.
Why do you feel that it’s less secure?
Sybil seems very impractical, but on the other hand, if we have to announce when snapshots will be taken so people can top up to 10%, we invite price manipulation for those slots to disenfranchise people close to the boundary.
Yes , NO should be allowed to vote at any % but must have at least one minipool active.
1 Like
Both options require an active minipool, because the upper bound is 150% of bonded ETH. Zero minipools, zero bonded ETH, 1.5*0=0 RPL to use for voting power
Jasper and Patches covered it well and I hope more consider casting their vote in alignment with all node operators (0-100%), regardless of current collateralization. All node operators have skin in the game.
1 Like
As a NO for nearly 1.5 years, having discovered rocketpool via ethstaker and superphiz efforts such as interviews with Joe on the stack etc
I made a substantial investment into RPL, and still continuing to buy. However now due to to market prices I have fallen under the 10% threshold.
I have voted in every vote available to me, have had a reasonable weighting etc Now for next month if prices stay same or worsen, then I will not be able to vote going forwards. That feels wrong to me and for others in a similar situation. Not being able to vote on improving the protocol that will affect us substantially.
Options left to folk in my position are to
- wait and forgoe votes, rewards until market prices improve
- buy more RPL
- dissolve minipools to improve collat %
all three economically punish less than 10%ers
hence I have voted and would have voted for all NOs (prior to my own collat % change) to be able to vote, leaving the status quo disenfranchises newer NOs, potentially reduces the number of minipools run by smaller NOs, centralises voting power and network dependence onto OG NOs at the expense of newer NOs.
8 Likes
Just for the record, here’s my reply in Discord and a discussion on the matter.
I’ve spent the better part of the day further discussing this and would like to add a couple more points to my argument.
Imagine that you came to the protocol in May with the hypothetical motivation of maximizing rETH market share (because you are aligned with RP’s goal of decentralizing the LST space). You have approximately 6,300 Eth.
To maximize rETH capacity, you purchase 1450 Eth worth of RPL, or at the time, about 66,000 RPL, and stake it. You create 605 LEB8s.
In May, you have:
- 605 LEB8s
- 1450 Eth worth of RPL at a ratio around 0.022
- 4840 Eth bonded
- 14520 Eth-of-rETH capacity created
- 128 voting power if <10% is enfranchised
- 128 voting power if <10% is not enfranchised
- A collateral ratio of borrowed Eth around 10%
- Yearly RPL rewards of around 116 Eth (rounded to 8% APR)
In October, because of the market, you have:
- 605 LEB8s
- 817 Eth worth of RPL at the ratio of 0.01238, down to 56% of principal
- 4840 Eth bonded
- 14520 Eth-of-rETH capacity created
- 128 voting power if <10% is enfranchised
- 0 voting power if <10% is not enfranchised
- A collateral ratio of borrowed Eth around 5.6%
- Yearly RPL rewards of 0 Eth
(differences bolded)
- Your investment in this protocol, and your alignment towards its growth has cost you 633 Eth.
- You have lost your RPL rewards.
- If we don’t vote to enfranchise <10% nodes, you have lost your voice in governance.
I do not believe a rational actor would buy another 633 Eth worth of RPL to top up. I feel like they are more likely to dump everything and walk away, which will hurt RPL’s bottom line.
Of course, this is still an issue with RPL rewards, even if <10% are enfranchised- but I believe sublinear bonding curves will come with megapools to eventually address that. You can easily observe here that this node operator is not a risk to the protocol, as they still have a bond of 5657 Eth, more than they could reasonably steal.
Note that your voting power did not increase as your collateral went down, it simply stayed the same: we are not giving you outsized representation in governance. In fact, you are suffering significantly from the square-root algorithm.
If you wanted to sybil, you would have made 907 nodes with 1 EB16 each and had an aggregate voting power of 907*sqrt(1.6/0.022)/2 voting power, or 3867 voting power. You are, in fact, worse off than someone who had sybiled to protocol, and can coalesce their nodes easily to get back above 10% by exiting half of them.
The only part of this that is hypothetical is the intent of the node operator. This is exactly what happened to 0xfd0166b400EAD071590F949c6760d1cCc1AfC967 - this is a link.
After joining in May, they spent October exiting 249 minipools, and I estimate the reason they did that is to continue to earn rewards on their 66,000 RPL investment. We have successfully incentivized this user to act against the growth of the protocol already- why do we want to further incentivize them by stripping their vote?
Further, it is inaccurate to say that enfranchising <10% gives more of a voice to small operators. Big and small nodes are equally impacted by a down market. The only thing giving small operators disproportionate representation is the square-root voting power calculation.
17 Likes
I agree with Jasper. At a time when some people are down bad on their RPL investment, we want to signal that they are still part of the Rocket Pool community and they have a voice.
2 Likes