Why not give ETH rent to ENS holders?

Why not give ETH rent to ENS holders?
Then they can buy more ENS with that ETH so ENS price goes up.

It doesnā€™t have to be all of the ETH rent but some % of it maybe.

ENS is a non-profit public good utility. It is outlined in the constitution that it will never generate profits, dividends, interest, or any other form of monetary incentives.

edit - that said I would gladly take it if you want to give some eth to ENS holders. :sweat_smile:

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damn it, its SEC again.
what if its not in US tho :wink:

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In my opinion, the idea would not be to pay $ENS holders, but to pay governance participants. I dont just mean voting delegates, but those assigning their votes to a delegate, in fact especially them. Here is a write up I made on that idea:

Iā€™m not a fan of complex rules or protocols.
Also, I mean people use vaults to auto compound their tokens. If you reward voting that would just create bots just voting to winning vote or voting randomly. People who donā€™t wanna participate still not gonna participate.

I just thought giving the rent ETH to ENS holders would connect the ENS token value to the ENS app better. And rent ETH would have a better place to go and would become more decentralized. Itā€™s not much different than how staking rewards work in Uniswap or Sushiswap etc. but you donā€™t print the rewards here so the reward token, in this case ETH doesnā€™t get inflated.

For me everything about ENS should be decentralized.

That said, Itā€™s not a place to say this but Iā€™m not a big fan of DAO tho, I believe stuff should be static. New stuff can be build on top of it but the base layer should be static.

I mean ENS can be eliminated completely and you can burn all of the rent ETH, itā€™s better than some people are having it.

But Iā€™m not gonna go that extreme rn :slight_smile:

The vaults are paid out using defi means - typically a project just mints a lot of tokens and slowly drips those out to users as an incentive mechanism. AKA a vault to payout from $ENS coffers? Iā€™d be 100% against that, ENS is not a defi token, its a governance token. ENS already has the user base, it does not need defi schemes to bring more in. The point of holding ENS is to participate in DAO governance, not to store away in a vault.

If you read the proposal I made, you would see that would not be beneficial to them.

again, you should read the idea I proposed. It would strengthen ENS by removing tokens from users who do not wish to participate (aka buying from those selling) and distributing to those who are participating in governance (either by voting, or even better by delegating their votes - which in my proposal would pay out better than voting directly).

Not sure what this has to do with the discussion, but I agree.

ENS is not for everyone, and if you dont want that responsibility then it is A-OK to sell the ENS. I will disagree strongly, however, that stuff should be static; always improving and changing should be the goal of every project.

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The point of this is not bringing more users. But connecting ENS with ENS token. So the ENS token has a more accurate price like BNB does. Once we have a more accurate token price, participating in DAO has a more accurate price. As more people use ENS, participating in it becomes more expensive. As less people use it, participating in it becomes less expensive.

I donā€™t think its a good idea to give some dedicated insiders more power. We have seen it with Wikipedia editors. itā€™s a bad idea. Making it more technically and socially complex only makes it more corruptible.

I have read it multiple times. I canā€™t see how Itā€™s not beneficial. I can just give my votes to a random delegate in top 10 and still earn. People just want the reward they are just gonna find a delegate and give the voting power to them. Which makes it more centralized eventually.

I donā€™t see how Itā€™s stronger like that. ENS is only changing hand basically and there are more sellers than buyers. That doesnā€™t make it more valuable. Also incentivizing people to give their votes to a delegate makes it more centralized, like BTC pools. When people buy a company stock they donā€™t necessarily wanna participate in it. If you remove the liquidity you just make it more corruptible.

The whole rewarding the ones who vote is a bad idea. You vote when you wanna vote. Not always.

Fix me if Iā€™m wrong.

This part its not really about the topic, I'm just replying you

Having nobody in control is more decentralized than having some people in control.

Smart contracts like ENS should be a little tool. You donā€™t change and improve Math.Pow function. ENS is a basic name service. You can build many stuff on top of it. But it doesnā€™t need to change. Changing base layers is a bad thing, every government is an example to this.

Thatā€™s all I wanted to say. I threw an idea, giving rent ETH to ENS holders would be good. and the rent ETH would have a purpose and would not be in the hands of the creators. It can be burned too but I think giving it to ENS holders would gather more votes as a proposal I believe.

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Personally Iā€™m strongly opposed to directly re-allocating these funds to holders of the $ENS token, and the reason is simple: the goal of the Ethereum Name System, including renewal fees, is explicitly NOT about trying to make the $ENS token more valuable or return benefits to the holders of the token. The purpose of the $ENS token is NOT about an avenue for ā€œinvestmentā€ in the Ethereum Naming System. It is about having an (imperfect) way to measure the communityā€™s views on specific decisions.

With that in mind, any other incentive to hold the token actively works against this purpose. In an ideal world there would be no incentive to hold the token at all except to participate in making the Ethereum Name System better and more useful. But since there are financial decisions to be made, it does seem inevitable that such a token will have some kind of market price. Still we have to always remember that this price is not the goal. If anything it is a potential threat to the goals of making ENS better which we have to continually watch out for. Paying people to hold these tokens is a very bad idea, because it makes the threat of purely financial takeovers worse.

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Thats precisely the action we want. Those who just want the reward will delegate their votes to someone who is in it for more than just reward and giving back to the project in a meaningful way. So you strengthen the votes of those users who are doing the diligence, and rewarding the users who delegate their vote to those worthy.

It doesnt even have to be a delegate in the top 10, you wouldnt receive any more or less reward than delegating to one of the bottom delegates. I even suggested having a cutoff at a delegate receiving more than a certain %, lets say 5% of total votes available, so that you also dont get one user with too much power. Anyone attaching their votes to that delegate would not see rewards, and thus decide to choose a different delegate. Thus preventing the centralization, by incentive!

Again, the purpose of ENS is not to have a price point, its to govern the DAO. In other words possessing the ENS token gives you power to vote for or against proposals and guide the direction you want ENS to go. The purpose of ENS is not to enrich holders, though it can be a byproduct, its not likely to become a speculation token, and it shouldnt. It is a token with a use case, and ENS is, in my opinion, one of the STRONGEST web3 projects at this time. So having a say in that project is where the worth of ENS comes from.

In my opinion, the goal of the community should be to encourage participation and incentivize doing so. In a similar manner as you propose, I just take it a step further - simply possessing the ENS token will not be rewarded, but being active in participation will; whether directly or through a delegate in whose decisions you trust.

even suggested having a cutoff at a delegate receiving more than a certain %, lets say 5% of total votes available, so that you also dont get one user with too much power. Anyone attaching their votes to that delegate would not see rewards, and thus decide to choose a different delegate. Thus preventing the centralization, by incentive!

I really like this idea. It seems from a number of the posts subsequent to the airdrop that many people just clicked a name in the top 10 that looked OK and Iā€™m not sure that many people read the manifestos, so potentially we have ended up in a situation with a lot of voting power with some delegates and itā€™s not that spread out. Would be useful to share this (if itā€™s not already shared somewhere) on a periodic basis to see whether the share of delegate voting is levelling out, or concentrating further.

Other idea I can think of offhand - a button for random delegate and it does something similar to Googleā€™s Iā€™m feeling lucky feature, and assigns to a random delegate. It doesnā€™t help with putting more voting power into the hands of ā€œgoodā€ delegates, but it may help spread the delegate votes around a bit for someone who isnā€™t interested in governance participation.

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In crypto world, you donā€™t have a choiceā€¦ someone sends you ETH, you canā€™t actually reject it.

I just would like to point out that this particular sentiment is extraordinarily elitistā€¦

I would MUCH prefer a voting system that did not have a Delegation requirement, as such requirement creates a silo of groupthink ā€¦ and completely removes ALL external ideas from the system.

Many times throughout history, Science advances best by including non-expert thoughts.

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You can delegate to yourself.

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Excellent and Plainly statedā€¦ would have appreciated such simplicity in the ā€œClaimsā€ interface.

However, perhaps I simply overlooked the ā€œDelegate to Selfā€ option in the list - if it was there.

To delegate to yourself in the claim UI you have to click ā€œenter name or addressā€ in the top right and enter your own address. We wanted to put just a little bit of friction in place so that it wasnā€™t an ā€œeasy defaultā€ for anyone who simply wanted to click something to get to the next screen and had no intention of participating.

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Thank you!

I understand the system and interface nowā€¦ and I understand the desire to add a level of complication to selecting oneself as a delegation authority.

I disagree with the premise, however.

But itā€™s all good now. I briefly self-delegatedā€¦ and then decided on an entity with whom I seem to agree on issues related to ENS. The delegation of voting power should have been left to a later time rather than a requirement to claim tokens (my 1.25 cents).

Correct me if Iā€™m wrong but the more value the token has the more secure is the DAO. if the price of $ens crashed a possible hostile takeover can be done. A malicious entity can get the majority of votes and taking decisions based on their interest. So how do we prevent this ? Simply with making ens token a valuable asset. The nature of the token is like that,it was listed in exchanges and itā€™s traded means if there is no incentive at all everyone will sell it. If wasnt this the intention why to begin with was created like that instead of creating a stablecoin if not pegged by a value asset it could have been an algorithmic one as well. If we dont give incentives to ens holders the DAO will be in danger imo.Regaiding the votes whoever is not interested will simply delegate to some other. But its not that is such a problem. Who is really interested he will continue to take part and contribute. People that are only for economic benefit they can simply be there as well as they will contribute to the security of the community. Seeing it a job that is required for safeguarding the core and the pricinciples of the decentralized internet. it would just utopistic to assume that everyone involve would need to work for free. Its the same as the idea of paying some contributors just masquerade under a different pretense.

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I think its a double-edged sword. The more value the token has, the more protected the DAO is from any type of hostile takeover - Though price action typically prevents this as well since as a single entity begins hoarding more and more, the value goes up and it costs said entity more and more to accumulate enough for takeover.

In my opinion, this isnt exactly the same as ā€œsecuringā€ the DAO. For that you actually want more diversified participation. Bring in more smart people, more discussion, more action. This is what will make the DAO better, and thus secure its place as a successful DAO. By increasing the price of each token, you are making it more and more difficult for small-fry to enter the game, and thus increasing the odds that the DAO is simply managed by whales. This is why it is important for projects such as this to initially distribute to key users! Which, again my opinion, ENS Core team did VERY well!! Now we have tons of small fish, key early users who truly believe in ENS and the concept, who have a voice in the system where they may not have been able to afford one in any other scenario.

So my tl;dr here is: ā€œYes and Noā€.

Many people misunderstand this as a direct ENS Core action. I dont believe it is. ENS is a token, it is a token which gives a vote toward DAO proposals. Essentially this is all it does. Now the beauty of decentralized web3 is that one cannot restrict what someone else does. And because it is a token, users are free to move said token at will as they wish. They are also free to pair that token up with another token and provide liquidity to any decentralized exchange, such as Uniswap. Really, there is no way to stop it, nor should anyone try. This, however, is not the purpose of $ENS, it simply has value because there are people who wish to have said voice in proposals to ENS DAO and are willing to trade other tokens of value for it.

Stable coins are not something easy to come by, nor are they guaranteed. DAI is my favorite decentralized stable coin, and the principals behind it are very complex and require constant adjusting by the MakerDAO group - its essentially a full time job! Other stable tokens require a centralized entity to act as custodian and demonstrate they maintain a backing for that stable coin such as USDC.

None of this is the desire of ENS Core team to maintain. Their desire was to create a token which gives a voice (vote) to control the DAO. This it does. Mission accomplished.

There have been lots of posts attempting to have $ENS do more than what it was designed and dedicated to do. Nobody in the real world is attempting to turn Peopleā€™s voters registration cards into currency, or into collateral, or anything like that.

So my suggestion is consider $ENS a voter registration card. Just as in the real world, you could likely sell yours (on the black market, for sure, and illegal, for sure, but you could) you can sell you ENS voter registration card.

Now the beauty of web3 is that it is neither illegal, nor necessarily frowned upon for you to sell the voter registration card you were given, or to buy someone elseā€™s who doesnt want it! In the end, however, attempting to give that voter registration card more capabilities than it wants/needs/deserves is not the correct move.

This is also a bit of a difficult position. I agree that we should give incentives to participants. Not necessarily ā€œrentā€ but that may just be a poor choice of wording or English as a 2nd language and not exactly what was meant. The problem with saying the DAO will be in danger if we dont, is that it insinuates the DAO will not be in danger if we do. It will, just the danger will be that we invite users who dont care about ENS and just want the income. Theyā€™d only be here to vote on proposals which do more for THEM, regardless of the repurcussions to ENS itself.

So we must be careful, and do the best we can to avoid unintended consequences - which really are unavoidable.

Here is where I really agree! A DAO is web3 mechanism to reimagine collaboration. Todayā€™s collaborations are typically companies. So if we user our imagination hereā€¦

ENS DAO is a company:

  • it has a product: ENS names and everything that comes with it
  • it has income: from ā€˜rentā€™ of said product
  • it has Organization: ENS DAO

So what is it missing? Leadership. Currently ENS Core is the leadership, and they will have that sway for some time to come, as they have already demonstrated an amazing ability to create and guide, or lead, this project forward.

So lets imagine ENS was a traditional company, it would have a CEO, board members, VPs, etc. All of whom get paid. Why? Because they need to focus their time and effort on their company. They need to ensure their product remains the best product available. They need to ensure projects are going as planned and moving forward. They need to ensure their employees are cared for and receiving compensation. It is a job!

So lets get back to ENS DAO as a decentralized organization. It needs leadership, it needs guidance, it needs contributors, and they need compensation. Otherwise the project stagnates and eventually becomes suprassed by a different solution which continued to innovate and surpassed ENS in utility and ingenuity.

I think with the proper incentives we can reach a point where the DAO hits an equilibrium that there are users who receive the compensation to afford to spend a majority of their time focused on ENS!

I linked a post earlier that has more details of a skeleton of an idea I proposed that would hopefully lead to an organized organization based on incentives! its here.

Let me know what you think!

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thanx for the detailed reply. In part you are right , practically iā€™m not sure about this implementation but i guess time will tell. Question that come to my mind reading the above. Would it be possible to limit the votes that a delegate can cast ? Wouldnā€™t like that be easier , setting a limit lets say max 10k votes per delegate so that bad actors (51%) will be excluded automatically and more voices will be in play ?

Thank you for sharing.

I found this reply very informative.

It paints a good picture of what are (and what are not) the motives of the DAO in regards to the issuing of the tokens.

Much appreciated!!!

In my more detailed post I touched upon this. I had suggested that incentives could be diminished and stopped once a delegate reached a certain number or % of votes (said number TBD). While this wouldnt be a hard cap, it would likely do a good job by discouraging users from delegating to someone over that cap as the user themselves would not receive incentive payouts, thus allowing the market to regulate that portion.