Core values and principles

[lrettig]

• Transaction fees should consistently be low enough that all people can realistically expect to transact on the network
• Developers building on the network should not face platform risk
• Two transactions, paying the same transaction fee, will always be considered equal by the network
• No censorship
• Transparency of governance, and an eternal, free knowledge base
• Ability to voice one’s preferences and concerns (via governance mechanisms)
• Freedom to exit (e.g., via fork)
• Data portability
• (Consider including Can’t Be Evil principles)

[Topper88]

• Interaction Specific T&Cs: responsibility stack, embedded Code of Conduct

• Managed Commons: to represent the interest of shared resources and the interest of us all collectively in objective manner

• Delegated Engagement: thinking of stackers' locking in STX to earn interest is evident, to make stacked amount of STX active, stackers required to engage with listed tasks or surveys voting etc., once all funds are active by engaging enough, the unlocking of interest earned are tied to activity.

[Topper88]

Two transactions, paying the same transaction fee, will always be considered equal by the network

I'm not against this, just posing a theory, it might be trivial concern: what if a transaction is delivering important vote, and bad actor's interest is to prevent timely verification of that vote and attempts to clog the network with enough number of transactions set with identical tx fees? can a bad actor succeed?

[lrettig]

Two transactions, paying the same transaction fee, will always be considered equal by the network

I'm not against this, just posing a theory, it might be trivial concern: what if a transaction is delivering important vote, and bad actor's interest is to prevent timely verification of that vote and attempts to clog the network with enough number of transactions set with identical tx fees? can a bad actor succeed?

Good question! Short answer: yes, a bad actor can always slow down or in theory even block transactions from being processed by flooding the network with transactions that pay higher fees - depending of course on the throughput of the network. That's the network working as it's designed to.

Our goal here would be good economics (cryptoeconomics!): it should be prohibitively expensive to carry out this sort of an attack. And the person submitting the "important vote" transaction should be able to pay a high enough fee to prevent it. That transaction has an advantage: if the fee they pay is $N (say it's $0.10), and it would take one million transactions (with a higher fee) to clog the network and prevent that transaction from being processed, then an attack has to spend $(N + e) * 1,000,000 =~ $100k to block the transaction. If the transaction originator pays 2N ($0.20), now the attacker has to spend $200k instead -- and it only cost the originator an extra ten cents! We want the economics to work like this... so that the "defending" party has enormous leverage relative to an attacker. Does this make sense?

In slightly more technical terms, we want to limit the ability of an attacker to carry out a "griefing attack" against the network, where it costs them less to attack than it costs someone to defend.

[Topper88]

Appreciate your response. Yepp, make sense to game out such attempts and I believe that is the right approach to do it. It raises another question though,

If voters are meant to be incentivized for their voting activity, then tx fees may cancel out their incentives to participate.

Especially in a situation, where the result would negatively impact one set of voters, but 'not negatively' affect another set of voters: A representation of interest by vote - that ends beneficiary to one set of voters - would justify the cost of tx fees for the beneficiary set of voters, but the "suffering" set would lose out on resulted impact and their voting incentives (spent on tx fee)... unless the surplus "vote securing" transactions cost inherently funds a kind of compensation pot to "suffering" set of voters. (This may be an answer to my question).

I guess, it's a pretty complex scenario, but probably a very common one, that touches people's sense of justice, hence I believe it needs to be translated in to core values and principles.

[lrettig]

If voters are meant to be incentivized for their voting activity

What sort of votes, and what sort of incentives, are you talking about?

[njordhov]

(Consider including Can’t Be Evil principles)

Can’t Be Evil principles should be prominent not just a side note.