If you search for the word “individuals” in this thread, you’ll find that there is only one poster repeatedly pushing this idea / rumor that there are “2-3 individuals blocking this effort”. It’s not true, and in my opinion, persistently promoting the idea of naming and shaming individuals for their perspective on a governance issue is misaligned with the community’s values.
No on-chain vote can happen until we have executable code for the protocol to implement, so it doesn’t really make sense to imply that there is some kind of vote suppression when there aren’t formal protocol actions to vote on yet!
Folks who would like to see this idea move forward to a proposal can help in any of the following ways. I’m sure there are others, but these are the ones I’m aware of:
(1a) If you are a solidity developer: implement a merkle root distributor that allocates testnet COMP to accounts using your preferred distribution model (see spreadsheet from @Cryptocraig posted earlier), deploy it on Kovan or Ropsten, and share it with the community for review and feedback.
(1b) If you are not a solidity developer, you could do some outreach/networking to see if we can find someone interested in taking on the merkle root distributor project, either as a learning opportunity, or as a proposal for future grant support.
(2) Read closely @getty 's thread on the future of COMP distribution and the forum activity since the bug in proposal 62. It is a difficult period to discuss the protocol’s token allocation after losing control of a single-digit percentage of the supply, but those discussions will need to carry on, and if you believe that an allocation to early users should be part of the conversation, then your voice is needed in those discussions.
By the way, in his recent remarks at the Compound Grants Summit at Eth Global, @rleshner commented that the initial token distribution is among the handful of things he would do differently if he could go back in time and build Compound from scratch again. Folks who have expressed a disinterest or opposition to an early user airdrop understand the value of empowering early users. I guess I just want to emphasize that the world is not black-and-white and that there is common ground to be found among the different ideas out there on how to effectively allocate protocol-controlled COMP.
If we can get a merkle root distributor implemented and thoroughly tested, I think there will be a willingness among the broader community to discuss what non-zero fraction of the available COMP could be justified for this initiative. What do you say?