Wei Tang @wei@that.world

Polkadot treasury call for proposals -- manual collection of validator information

NPoS relies heavily on nominators' building trusts with validators. Many wallets provide certain "scores" for validators. However, there are only so much you can do with automated scores, and they must be accompanied with manually collected information to be complete. This is what this CFP is about -- manually asking validators about why they can be trusted -- node setups, fees, postmortems, etc.

Polkadot treasury call for proposals -- offline wallet tooling that does not rely on the browser

Something like Bitcoin's Electrum, or Monero's CLI wallet. A good way to improve security is to reduce the attack surface. Browsers can do too many things, and for a wallet, it is bad.

Polkadot treasury call for proposals -- build a Mastodon community

There is currently no concentrated community in Mastodon specifically for Polkadot, so we need to build one! News needs to be bridged from Twitter regularly, and efforts have to be made to create the community. Using a cryptocurrency, you may as well want to make more things in your life decentralized!

Polkadot treasury call for proposals

In this toot thread, I list some (often bite-sized) treasury proposals that I really want to see in the Polkadot community. Like the saying goes, a good proposal is usually one that surprises us. However, if you are looking for some inspirations, here you go!

Now that the fix was already deployed, I can finally talk about the anyone-can-send zero address on Polkadot. https://that.world/~wei/polkadot/specific/zero/

Improved way of handling Ethereum transaction signatures in Frontier. It's also backward-compatible! https://github.com/paritytech/frontier/pull/482

Dealing with the problem of governance inactivity -- a new #Neatcoin council design that is kept alive. https://github.com/neatcoin/neatcoin/discussions/3

Our current performance bottleneck is on GRANDPA, but not on BABE. By separating the validator set of those two, it is indeed practical to accomplish 10,000+ validators. https://github.com/neatcoin/neatcoin/discussions/2

I un-broke the chain! #Polkadot

We were made aware of a security issue affecting SputnikVM -- possible denial of service on EVM execution due to memory over-allocation. Please update your crate versions immediately! https://rustsec.org/advisories/RUSTSEC-2021-0066.html

Ideas of a universal basic income (UBI) project on #Kulupu. https://github.com/kulupu/coordination/discussions/14

A draft proposal for version 3 of Kulupu's PoW engine. The goal is to make it more light client friendly and to further improve syncing speed. https://github.com/kulupu/coordination/discussions/12

Polkaregistry is live! https://polkaregistry.org/docs/procedure/

Towards a common-good identity parachain for #Polkadot! https://polkaregistry.org/docs/vision/parachain/

In this sense, on-chain governance may not be perfect, but in most cases, including for base-layer blockchains, it is better than hard fork governance, because you can always improve the rules and draw a much larger opinion sample to reach an enforceable decision. (7/7)

Hard fork governance is like having a ruler that you cannot change. For the majority of time, the ruler will act according to people's will, because he wants to stay in power. However, the only way to replace that ruler, is to throw by force. (6/7)

On one hand, it makes hard fork relatively stable in that you always know who'll continue to "be the original coin". On the other hand, every controversial hard fork becomes a mess because the implicit "agreement process" will always be doubted by everyone, including devs. (5/7)

Many of the past hard fork dynamics are depicted as coin holders vs. miners, but if you look closely, a more accurate assessment would be developers vs. an opposing party. (4/7)