I took a dive into the Terra/Luna White paper and I found it to be similar to the way Hive Power and Hive Backed Dollars interact.
One one side instead of DPOS, Luna was POS. Staked Luna was most like both Hive Power. There is a 13 week power down period for Hive power and there is a 3 week power down period for Luna.
Hive Dollars are backed by Hive in that an owner of said dollars can always obtain a dollar's worth of Hive from these dollars. Terra Dollars are backed by Luna in that an owner of said dollars could at one time obtain a dollar's worth of Luna from these dollars.
In Terra/Luna the blockchain rewards didn't go to authors but did go to block producers on a schedule just like Hive does now. Terra/Luna had transaction fees based on percentages of amounts rather than per transaction or per byte. Hive has zero fees. Smart contracts offered by Terra added complexity to the blockchain but it suddenly got demand and adoption while Hive assets were ignored.
There was a Treasury in Luna/Terra, and in Hive there is a DHF. Different in that everyone can vote for proposals but the whales will control things for the most part in both cases, I'd say given the probable lack of distribution common in crypto-currencies. I have taken this to be an emergent property of currencies. Because not everyone will understand the concept, trust the code, or feel interested in the mission at the start, or save for the future in it, and some will. That's okay there are benefits to users who get in late (with some exceptions):
- Transferable over any communications channel if the either party has internet
- no confiscation
- no transaction censorship
- no replaying sent numbers to steal funds (like in credit cards)
- no fraud concerns for the merchant
- no identity connection to the funds necessary
We have seen confiscation of funds on the Steem network and so generally speaking not all currencies are created equal. If Steem had been more like Bitcoin's chaotic mining PoW, miners could start up and free the funds.
It seems to me, that our lack of adoption of the stable asset (HBD) is actually in itself an asset to the chain. Hot money came in to Terra/UST and drove up the price of Luna, and then create more UST were created beyond that the prior marketcap of Luna could support. When the bear market hit hard, too many at once wanted to get out of Terra in to liquidity. Essentially like a big rug-pull. Terra lost and Luna lost. UST now can be bought for just under 2¢.
What can we learn from this? I believe we should discuss what Hive is doing right and what could go wrong to prevent this scenario from happening on the Hive/HBD blockchain.
I think the key points for differences between the two pairs of assets is the requirement for the value of all of the HBD be only 10% of the combined HBD+Hive market cap or less. The other thing may be the half-week delay for conversion in either direction. If you try to create dollars after the HBD reaches 10% of the marketcap, does it fail? Price manipulation of the markets in order to get value out of arbitrage is controlled by the delay. There is no mention of a delay in the Terra white paper. A search of the web found many references to trading but not destroying one asset to receive another. Perhaps it was a one block operation, or perhaps there was time involved to do that conversion.
I would caution devs who contemplate removing these restrictions.
Has removing these restrictions been talked about in core dev meetings?