@agorise, this is an interesting proposal with some good ideas, but I do have concerns.
No. 1, reducing the whale vote to equal status with a Day 1 Newbie's post isn't practicable. I don't think a single whale will support it, and you're not going to get this implemented without at least some whale votes. While I understand the reasoning behind the proposal, I don't think it will work in practice. Perhaps there needs to be a bone thrown to the big dog that is guarding the gate. Perhaps, instead of basing upvotes on Hive Power, there was a progressive UV-weight measure based on a number of factors, such as:
- HP
- Diversity of UVs over a 30-day time period (i.e. did you only vote for other whales or did you also distribute your voting power over a wide array of HP-weighted accounts and content types?)
- The use of one's HP to support initiatives that benefit the entire chain ecosystem and those of less fortunate status (in other words, once you achieve a high level of HP, do you use that HP to upvote your whale friends and their content or do you also delegate some of it to initiatives that are educational and empowering to others in the community, particularly newbies trying to learn about Hive and increase their own earning power?)
- Ratio of content creation vs. curation and commenting over a 90-day time-weighted timeframe
- Others?
Rather than "penalize" someone for being a whale, I think the proposal needs to address creative ways to incentivize whales to use their status for the good of the community/blockchain. After all, we want community-minded Hiveans at all levels of the power structure. In other words, incentivize philanthropy as opposed to penalizing success.
Another concern is the Power Down reduction to three weeks. I'm not sure what the thinking is behind this. In my mind, a longer Power Down process encourages staking and keeps large numbers of people from Powering Down at the same time and crashing the economy. That would be a terrible thing.
Finally, it sounds like you want to nix HBD. I thought HBD's purpose was to act as a counter to the volatility of Hive. If it works that way, it's doing its job. I do understand the concern about the anonymous central bank controlling the value of the stablecoin. We don't want another Terra LUNA scenario where an HBD de-pegging event causes a run on Hive. Lowering the HBD savings to 1 percent while at the same time lowering the Power Down process to the three weeks could very well do that. That would be my concern.
If I'm right, the witnesses are the sole arbiters of what the HBD interest rate is. There is no check or balance on the power of the witnesses to validate transactions and set the rules for the chain. What if there was a community DAO that acted as an advocate for the rest of the community whose sole purpose was to bring proposals to the witnesses that would effectively lead to new updates such as interest rate changes and the other kind of changes you are proposing. You stand a much better chance at getting things like these implemented if you approach each issue one at a time rather than as a complete package. And it would also allow the community to discuss each issue separately as we adjust our expectations.
I had that thought as well about such a drastic change all at once regarding the HP of the whales. A gradual change could be coded in and then once the conversion has finished, over the course of say 3 to 6 months, then that graduation code could be removed or commented out for efficiency.
I seriously doubt many people with HP delegated to them will want a time-limit or any kind of constraint added to delegations. Men and women alike that gain power are very reluctant to letting go of that power. So yeah, getting this point (of the 12) voted in might be impossible. If you want the omelette though, we are going to have to break a few eggs.
We have tried the "Power" thing, and it obviously never ends well.
I love your thinking in those 4 points too Allen. Having a mix of things (kind of like a basket of currencies) seems to be a much more stable alternative for the worth of an UV or DV. Diversity is important. It levels the playing field for all and shows that co-existence is not only possible, but preferable imo.
RE: Powerdown (unstake) time from 13 down to 3 weeks. I went with 3 because I have seen how long it takes to figure out a fix for a hack, develop a patch for the hack, and the time that it takes for someone to remove their emotion and think logically about what is happening at ay given point in time. I too would not like to see a mass dumping of Hive, so yeah we could increase that a bit more to say 4 or 5 weeks?
RE: HBD - I like the ability to trade (via L1 wherever possible) from the core coin to other native coins on the chain, just like I used to do with the MPA's (aka "smartcoins") and BTS on the Bitshares chain. So, keeping HBD would be smart, but we need to be realistic about the savings account interest rate on it, the ability to exit positions and the implementation of the new CBDC's that are now being implemented worldwide. As history shows, the value of your assets in Dollars gets devalued 1000 to 1 when a new currency is implemented. They might still call it a Dollar, but that CBDC will buy you 1000 times less. Lowering the interest rate will encourage people to exit those positions now before it's too late and it will help Hive at the same time as per the reasoning in Hive5 section 10.
As for breaking this post up into multiple posts, I didn't do it that way because it just seems like every time someone has done that in the past, their post gets mixed in with all the other complaint posts. My dad always said, go big or go home. Lay it out there, make some noise. Hell, even give it a brand name and shortcut url so that people can talk about Hive5 and send people to these versioned posts easily (Hive5.info).
I'm hoping that we can get the conversation going, and keep it going this time until real change actually starts to get implemented.
Well, you know, nothing ventured nothing gained. So kudos for starting a tough conversation. What you say is true about delegations. The delagatees aren't going to want time limits on those. Personally, I like the idea of being able to, as delegator, choose when my delegation is removed. A time constraint could take that away. And, seriously, that aspect of your proposal is much less disruptive and probably less influential on the outcome you're looking for than other aspects of it are.
I'm convinced the only real protection against centralization of power is pure decentralization. Hive can't achieve that with DPOS. The fact that there are witnesses who are voted in by the rest of us means that there is less decentralization than we're all comfortable with. And I can't bear to think how many inactive accounts have active witness votes that may never expire because account owners are nowhere to be found. If you want to spark real change, how about a time limit on witness votes? What if they expired after three years, or expired after an account holder had no on-chain activity in one year?
I still think a longer duration time of power down is a wise move. If you want to reduce it, I'd be more comfortable with 7-10 weeks.
Good point on the multiple posts. It probably is best to lay it out all there and get the conversation going.
Good point! Yeah, if votes are not limited by time, then over time they are most likely to stack up, giving some Witnesses virtually endless power and making them ever harder to vote out imo.
I will add that in an additional Witnesses section of this Hive5 project into v1.3 next week.
As for the unstake (power down) time period, the 3 weeks can definitely be increased. Let's meet at 6 weeks for now. It's rough, but let's give this one more time so that others have a chance to comment on the number of weeks they too feel a new unstake time would be ideal.
Thank you again Allen for your ideas! 💚💚