Hi asam0oo,
Again, greatly appreciate the comments.
Regarding the potential for abuse, I agree that this is a big issue and needs to be addressed if we are to consider rolling this out. If we do end up trying this, I would suggest we start with variants that are not easy to game, while being in theory beneficial and test the waters.
For example, we can start with social-2-earn and limit it to 100 participants where each participant must have at least 500 followers and contributes by retweeting the most recent community post. We then evaluate this over a period of time and assess the results. If it is both beneficial and not being abused, we can slowly roll out other variants of contribute-2-earn while constantly evaluating the results and potentials for abuse. At any point, we can decide to terminate the trial. Would you be supportive of such a trial?
Note here that the action-reward mechanism illustrated above is only meant to serve as an example, and does not necessarily represent what the final trial contribute-2-earn action-reward mechanism would be. I’m open to thoughts on what that would look like and what the trial would be.
Re: hiring professionals through grants, I think its natural to feel that this would be a better alternative. Thinking from a game perspective, there is nearly no risk in choosing this option, and the reward will be within a range bound expectation. On the other hand, experimenting with contribute-2-earn is more like taking a higher-risk and potentially higher-reward path. If it works well, then we will have more members contributing and more members joining, creating a greater environment for all community members. If it doesn’t work out, we could be introducing bad actors into our community and spoiling the experience for others.
I’m of the thought that if we take this step-by-step and control for bad actors, even if it doesn’t work out it will have minimal impact on the community and MC culture. I see a lot of upside potential and limited downside potential, thus, I would vote to at least run a small trial run and evaluate from there.
Re: whether MC members want ENS names, again I would say we try to gather more data (something on the north side of 500 votes) to see if this is something they want. Thanks for providing this data, as you said here, 8.2% of the top 1000 MC holders have ENS names, which isn’t very significant. However, looking at some more numbers, there are approx. 2.8M ENS domain names and ~220M Ethereum addresses, so by that ratio, it would appear that MC holders are more likely to hold an ENS domain name than the average web3 user.
That being said, what would perhaps be a bit more convincing is that other gaming organizations also seem to be interested in subdomain names. Decentral land has their own subdomain builder/contract that they deployed. Manage Names in the Builder | Decentraland I can’t seem to find the link for the contract, but if I recall correctly, they had something like 14k subdomain names registered.
I also talked to Star Atlas and they were interested, citing that they had thought about rolling out subdomain names, but pushed it back due to privacy/anonymity concerns among big token holders (glad to see there is a common theme of privacy concern here, this is significant). I’m currently talking with them as well to have this implemented.
Re: 1. I won’t try to convince you that you want an MC address handle. That being said, I don’t think you fit the typical MC member profile. You already contribute to the DAO, and having an added incentive to do so likely will not change how you contribute. You also value being anonymous so having a subdomain name would not make sense.
However, what I can attempt to do is to convince you that the typical MC member (regardless of if they hold token or not) would want a subdomain name. I can bring up examples that I brought up in my previous responses, highlighting Decentral Land, Star Atlas, etc. but what would be much more convincing is to simply do a poll with our members. If we can do a MC sponsored poll and collect at least a few hundred votes, then I think the answer will be clear. I like to let numbers do the talking 
- Again here, I don’t think you would have any reason to switch to anon.mc. I would in fact recommend that you don’t because its giving others information that could be used to doxx you. For those that are not as concerned about privacy, they can proudly display their MC handle on social media, but more importantly, use it as a means to build on-chain reputation. The subdomain name is an NFT - and thus, contributions can be stored as NFT metadata and used to create a SBT. Members that contribute can take their “profile” and bring it to other communities as a sort of digital resume. This can be immensely helpful, for example, to get hired by another DAO to contribute full time.
As for how this will accrue token value for the DAO:
The premise of all of this is to get more members to contribute. Through more member contribution, we will accelerate the process by which we go from ideation to implementation to seeing that implementation bear fruit. This will in turn attract more members to join, bringing in more subdomain name fees, which goes towards more rewards for members to contribute, creating a virtuous cycle. All this while, the MC token value will steadily accrue value.
- Great question. I think a take-up rate of 10% would be pretty successful. My expectation with MC subdomains is that at least a few whales will squat the “rare” subdomain names, a common occurrence among any name service. For example, something like Amazon.eth sold for I believe $1M last year. As with .eth names, we can sell the more rare ones for a higher price, or perhaps, auction them off. For reference, I believe .eth domain names are 0.5 ETH for 3 letter domain names and 0.1 ETH for 4 letter domain names, and ~$5 for 5+ letter domain names (note this does not include gas fees).
Looking at numbers, I assume here that non-MC token holders will actually participate as well, so the calculations here should start with higher than 8625. But for now, we can start with this.
Assuming we use an auction format, I believe the skew will be bi-model, aka there will be a lot of domain names that sell for $5 and a lot of names that sell for a lot more than $5 (i.e. rare ones). I won’t dive deep into the numbers here because its mostly speculation, but I’ll try to walk through a simple example.
Let’s assume 1000 MC members each buy 5 domain names (that’s the ratio for ENS domain names), then even if they all only buy $5 domain names, that would be $25,000 per one year of renewals. Let’s assume that some whales will want in and so the average turns out to be $100 per person vs. $25, then that would be $100,000 if everyone only renewed for one year. This still isn’t much, but 100k a year would still probably help us grow the community if its used to reward members for contributions.
As more members come in, this number will naturally go up. To generate more fees, we can make it more exclusive (something like $50 per regular domain name) or take a royalty for when these domain names exchange hands on a marketplace. The point here is that it may not be that much at the start, but as network effects take place, it will certainly be no small sum.
Finally, to address your question, I would say if we can generate $50,000 from domain name purchases within the first two months of rolling this out that would be a success (contingent on a situation where at least a few hundred members buy domain names, and not where a couple whales account for all of the fees generated). We can then build on that and continue from there.
In conclusion, I do believe we both want MC to thrive and have more members contributing. It really just comes down to whether this specific proposal, or perhaps some variant of it, would be worth the effort to try. Like I said earlier, I think the best thing to do is to get a poll with some significant amount of votes from MC members (not just those that participate in governance) and proceed from there. If the people want something, then we should look to deliver it