Kusama Council Participation Report, 08.10.2020.

I was re-elected to Kusama Council recently (thank you voters!) so here's my promised activity log.

Motions and Referenda

• I voted AYE on Motion 224, now referendum 89. It's a runtime upgrade to the newest v2025 version. I verified this runtime's hash with srtool to make sure it's legit, and given that it doesn't contain any breaking changes and includes Bounties - a Treasury upgrade we're all VERY eager to start playing with - I supported the motion. I also voted AYE on the resulting referendum.
  
  
• I voted NAY on referendum 88. The referendum aims to increase the number of validators on Kusama by 1 every era for the duration of 400 eras. This means it would ramp Kusama up to 1000 validators in some 3 months. Given that the lowest staked validator has 6000 KSM behind them, and the average is ~9600, I feel like this is already quite unsafe for the network. Diluting the pool further would drive the average per validator even lower, and likely reduce the barrier to entry to even less than 6000 KSM. Because Kusama does not yet have parachains, nor is it even approximately known when this functionality will be enabled, I believe the network is secure enough as it is. I understand the slogan is "expect chaos", but I do not think we should reduce the security of the network to welcome that chaos.

Treasury

• Tip 0xee3d...1bd7 is for Stateless.Money who made a video tutorial on withdrawing one's tokens from a centralized exchange and nominating in the Polkadot UI. I tipped 3 KSM. This is a useful video, but I don't think it's worth 10 KSM (the current mean), especially considering its purpose is driving more profit towards Stateless Money who run a validator and encourage users to nominate them.
  
  
• Tip 0x8033...c242 rewards a new post by Polkadot Comics. I don't see these comics as particularly hard to make, or as particularly unique in terms of art and style. In fact, I'd call it plagiarized but I'm not sure if they legally purchased the stock illustrations or just took them. I tipped 2 KSM for the effort of distilling our wiki content into easy to consume bullet points.
  
  
• Tip 0xb8d8...4a28 rewards a Polish Youtube channel that pushes Kusama and Polkadot education. The channel seems well visited with a high subscriber count, so I think this is definitely worth the mean of 10 KSM. I supported this tip.

Discussions

• I requested more information on the proposal to fund a robotics+Kusama project. While it does sound interesting, I do not see the point, or I simply do not understand how robots would talk to the chain that differs significantly from them just logging their output to a server.
  
  
• There is a proposal to finance an augmented reality art project in Vancouver which would be deployed for 2 years. I think this is a fantastic project (please read the proposal in this thread) so I voiced my full support of it and will be supporting the proposal if it gets submitted to treasury.

Again, thank you to all who voted to keep me in the council - I always try to keep the best interest of the network in mind, so if you disagree with any of the decisions I laid out in this post, I welcome your feedback - please get in touch.