Application Resilience
Are there entities capable of taking a canister offline? As long as the cycles are paid for does the canister stay there indefinitely? What's stopping somebody from making a kiddy-porn site and making it unable to take down?
Posted May 31, 2021, 8:24 PM UTC
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NNS proposals can (after a majority vote) remove canisters and likely much more (e.g. block a wallet or transfer tokens earned through illegal means). Any neuron holder can make a proposal (although I suspect the process is not very well documented yet).
What are NNS proposals and how hard would it be to get a majority vote?
(Please note I'm not trying to host kiddy-porn or anything else illegal)
Here's a link to a video that explains the NNS. And below it, if you don't want to sit through the video and prefer instead to skim text, a bunch of related links covering the same concepts.
As to how hard it would be to get a majority vote, that depends. If you're talking kiddie-porn, likely not hard at all. If you're talking vaguely dangerous political arguments, probably impossible.
You simply need to convince a majority of IC neuron holders (by voting power) of whatever argument you're making. It's intended as a (very literal) democracy.
So these votes are granted by neurons (which are staked ICP?) which are then locked for 6 months. How long does a neuron holder have to vote on an issue before a decision is made?
Also you guys should consider making an appearance at CES, would totally go to attend a seminar on this.
Yes, neurons are staked ICP and have to be configured with a stake duration in order to be able to vote and earn rewards. There are strong incentives to stake for up to 8 years, which offer the greatest rewards. If you stake for only 6 months then you don't earn much reward at all. The incentives are intended to attract long term investors who want to participate in IC governance.
Voting on a case by case basis isn’t scalable.
Let’s say you wanted to create some automated program that removes certain inappropriate content like mentioned by the OP.
Could you then vote on giving this app running on a canister permission to remove other canisters? The idea being that if this application ever got out of hand another vote could be held to remove it’s censorship permissions.
Just curious if there’s any writing/article/discussion that’s been published on this type of a scenario
I don't think there's anything written specifically on this scenario. But assuming this ends up a decentralized network controlled by liquid democracy, one could imagine a number of ways this could go down.
One is what you propose, an automated system based on user input. Another is delegating certain tasks (e.g. dealing with illegal content) to something like a virtual legal system. Or a combination thereof, including a way to appeal a decision if e.g the canister owner thinks there's a misunderstanding. With only important decisions bubbling all the way to the top (i.e. the NNS) and everything else being done either automatically or decided by a small group of trained people (and not contested by the owner).