Set Proposer Base & Bonus Reward to 0

Hub Proposals Parameter Change
1

Change log

  • 2023-11-25 : Created initial post
  • 2023-11-25 : Updated w/ forum link url

Summary

Set Proposer Base & Bonus Reward to 0

Details

The proposer base & bonus reward parameters have been removed entirely from the distribution module in more recent releases of the Cosmos SDK (v0.47 & v0.50) [PR #12876]

Leaving these proposer rewards turned on is incentivizing centralization due to how tendermint does proposer selection because the top validators, who propose more often, get more rewards than the smaller validators.

Until the hub upgrades to a newer version of the SDK we can at least set these two parameters to 0, effectivly disabling the bonus.

Parameter and new value

[
  {
    "subspace": "distribution",
    "key": "bonusproposerreward",
    "value": "0"
  },
  {
    "subspace": "distribution",
    "key": "baseproposerreward",
    "value": "0"
  }
]

Forum post link

Forum Post Link - Set Proposer Base & Bonus Reward to 0

Governance votes

The following items summarize the voting options and what it means for this proposal:

YES - You agree that the Cosmos Hub should set the Base & Bonus Proposer reward distribution parameters to 0.
NO - You disagree that the Cosmos Hub should change Base & Bonus Proposer reward distribution parameters to 0.
NO WITH VETO - A ‘NoWithVeto’ vote indicates a proposal either (1) is deemed to be spam, i.e., irrelevant to Cosmos Hub, (2) disproportionately infringes on minority interests, or (3) violates or encourages violation of the rules of engagement as currently set out by Cosmos Hub governance. If the number of ‘NoWithVeto’ votes is greater than a third of total votes, the proposal is rejected and the deposits are burned.
ABSTAIN - You wish to contribute to quorum but you formally decline to vote either for or against the proposal.

1 Like
2

The design of these parameters was heavily debated during the Cosmos launch. It’s pretty clear at this point that these tweaks to the economic incententives have minimal practical effect.

You can trace the debate here.

The presence or absence of economic incentives for proposal seems to have minimal practical effect. We do see misconfigured validators missing all their proposals and the loss of the proposer bonus doesn’t motivate fixing configurations.

Precommit censorship has never been observed in practice.

There are likely to be ways to manipulate the Tendermint algorithm for economic advantage but it’s unlikely that this mechanism mitigates them.

I support setting these values to zero and responding to economic attacks in the future as they are observed.

4 Likes