Today at 15:43:45 UTC time, the HiveSQL proposal found itself no longer funded following the withdrawal of @blocktrades' vote.
This quickly resulted in HiveSQL going back to "subscription mode" and no longer accepting new account creation requests. A short time later, following the reactivation of the subscription code, HiveSQL users who did not have an active subscription were denied access to the database.
Information
Before you take out your pitchforks and torches and go to take him to the stake, let's see the reasons for such an action from @blocktrades.
I will repeat here the explanations given to me by @blocktrades, which I find concise, understandable and full of common sense.
HBD is worth more than $1 right now. [It raised over $2, close to $3]
The proposals were written with the assumption that HBD was worth $1.
So when HBD goes more than a dollar, those proposers get more than expected.
So the voters [i.e. anyone] [can] unvote them temporarily, and this serves two purposes:
- the proposers aren't overpaid
- the additional HBD that is now available gets used to buy up Hive, to allow for more proposals to be funded in the future.
I would add that buying HIVE using HBD can only be beneficial for the price of HIVE and therefore for all of us (read the HBD stabilizer post from @smooth).
Of course, this is the personal opinion of @blocktrades, and so is his action. But it's something that is acceptable to me.
I do not see this as disapproval on his part nor a withdrawal of his support for the HiveSQL project and its proposal, but as a targeted and temporary action to deal with a very specific situation.
Reaction
As always, this kind of situation always happens when you decide to take a break (read my last Witness Update post) and you are no longer at your computer. It's hard when you're on your way for a long trip to stop and sort it out.
I am therefore sorry for the delay in my reaction.
Anyway, I have now been in a hurry and the connections to HiveSQL are re-enabled, which for the time being makes it possible to keep HiveSQL free, even if the proposal is no longer funded.
I have not yet had the opportunity to look at the code for creating new HiveSQL accounts. I will do it tomorrow at rest to avoid introducing bugs.
Support
If you have any questions or remarks, support is provided on the HiveSQL Discord Channel.
Thank you.
Do you want the HiveSQL proposal to be funded again right now?
- Vote for the HiveSQL proposal on Peakd.com
- Vote for the HiveSQL Proposal on Hive.blog / https://wallet.hive.blog/proposals/138
- Vote for the HiveSQL Proposal using HiveSigner
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I guess we're stating facts.
Like how your proposal has been around since 2020-11-12. During that time, your proposal was exposed to the risk of under payment, if the peg fell below the target. Proposals were also subject to small underpayments due to a bug.
It is unlikely that these two risks would have been compensated, and they are (mostly) understood when a proposal is created. It's just the way proposals are.
It's too bad there's a double-standard.
In the case of severe undervaluation/underpayment beyond a few cents (which would only happen with the haircut, as @blocktrades stated), it is my opinion that a lot of proposals would absorb it for a limited period, but would then either request additional funding or cut service/spending in some manner. I could be wrong, but that's how I see it, and I think the current situation is pretty similar. Proposals have been overpaid for a month or so, and it was overlooked/absorbed as a market fluctuation, but at some point it does become too significant to ignore.
There's reasonable protection against the price of HBD going too low: the HBD->Hive conversion mechanism. It only fails in the case of the haircut. There is currently no mechanism to protect against HBD going too high (with the possible exception recently of the hdbstabilizer, which is being employed now). So the opportunities for each possibility are not the same.
And in such a case, any proposer who feels he is not getting enough can, in fact, create a second proposal to get paid more.
That's definitely an opinion, not a fact, and one I disagree with.
I get it. But proposals also now have an option to reduce pay. If there was some direction given, perhaps on a weekly basis, "Reduce pay by n % or risk being unfunded," that might help.
Is that out of the question?
Is there a mechanism in the blockchain for that or would they have to send it back, and then stakeholders make sure that it is being sent back? The latter seems possible and fair to me, but a bit of a pain.
While we're waiting for clear direction, I'll just drop mine from 130 HBD to 45 HBD.
Again, how is that done? I was asking because I want to learn.
It's a new feature for HF24:
https://gitlab.syncad.com/hive/hive/-/releases/v1.24.2
There's been a discussion in DHF forum in mattermost for weeks about potentially temporarily unvoting proposals due to high price of HBD. But it wasn't until today that HBD jumped suddenly. A weekly advisory basis isn't really possible as long as HBD price is so volatile. I certainly had no idea it would spike to $3 today.
From what I can see the option to reduce the pay is worse for proposals. As it is, they temporarily lose funding, but will be able to go back to full funding after they are voted back in.
If they lower their funding, and HBD went back to $1, I don't think they can raise the funding level back and would need to create and campaign for entirely new proposals to reach the same funding level. So I don't think that mechanism is that useful for the situation of fluctuating HBD. I believe it was mainly added as a method for bargaining between proposers and voters.
Another potential option would be for proposers to just temporarily redirect their funds to the hdbstabilizer, but some might not feel comfortable doing so, because they might feel they were overstepping the guidelines of their original proposal, unless they had put in such a clause when they originally made their proposal.
From the available options, it looked to me like a temporary unvote was the most reasonable choice.
Why would you do this?
Look, I value HiveSQL very much. I use it for hivedapps.com. I paid for it in the past and I'm glad that it's "free" now. You raised the price initially from 10 SBD to 20 SBD and then to 40 SBD, due to the broken peg (~0.5 I think), but even with a functioning peg you didn't go back as you argued it's due to higher costs.
The HiveSQL proposal has been funded for 5 months. 5 x 3000 HBD * 1.2 (rough peg) = 18000 USD. In Oct 2020, a month before the proposal got funded, you had 11 subscriptions x 40 HBD = 440$ income - compared to now 3600$ per month.
Are you telling us that you went through all the funds already or that the infrastructure costs increased 8x, that you had to break applications by making HiveSQL paid again?
I don't know how much of the 4950 HBD per month for HiveBuzz is going to you. Even just 50% of it would be a very nice chunk of money. Add to that your TOP20 witness pay and you get 3 different sources of income from Hive.
This should be well enough, for you to easily cover any "pause" of proposals, even ones that are done because you got paid above peg in the past.
Edit: Read your witness update. Sorry to hear that you're not too well. Wish you a good recovery. Considering that you'd not be able to actively work on HiveBuzz and the proposal probably not going to get unvoted because of that, it can be used to cover any potential "debt" accumulated over the time your proposals are paused.
Exactly, I was using paid sql subscription for a very long time, and sometimes I was checking how many people is using it and suming up the sub fees that were going to arcange's wallet.. it was WAY lower than arcange is ecpecting to get from DHF. I was silent till now. It is ridicoulus, the funding of this project from dhf is way too high in my opinion. If I'm wrong I'm gonna ask for cost details.
Adding up the subscription fees received to assess the cost of a project like HiveSL is not the right way to proceed. As I explained in my numerous posts, I first funded it by myself, then compensated the difference between the subscriptions and the real costs of this project, all this out of my own pocket for years.
In
Steem's history, all the other projects that proposed something similar for free, and which sometimes even received more money than what I collected with the subscription, broke their necks and disappeared. It is only because I am an enthusiast and money is not my driver that HiveSQL is still here.Free has a cost, and those have been detailed in the proposal. Not happy with the proposal and its services, do not vote for it and ask for your HiveSQL account removal.
Is sort of because of this the reason https://hivedata.space/ is kind of stuck? What do you need to continue that service? Punch me in the face anywhere.
Doing what?
Did I complain about the proposal temporarily not being funded?
Have I let applications that rely on HiveSQL crash because of this?
It is quite the opposite that my post describes and I invite you to read it again.
PS: Thank you for worrying about my health, but I assure you, I am not on the verge of death either.
I just have to take care of myself, stop living pedal to the metal and (try to) get some rest. Reason vs passion, something you may know about.
It was my impression that you manually went back to subscription mode. Did you write some code that checked whether the proposal was funded and toggled subscription mode? If that's the case, sorry for coming to the wrong conclusion, though that part of the code should have been disabled. (My guess is that you added it after/before you initially created the proposal)
I just wanted to add my two cents, as an outsider looking in
I have a very limited understanding of what everyone is on about here. Not entirely clueless, mind you, but pretty close
I only want to comment on how civil the dialogue is
I find it inspiring
Thank you for your feedback @focus.folks
Hive also has its share of drama and trash talk, but that is thankfully the exception.
So, let's follow the inspiring way 😉
I'm still unsure unfunding our community developers trying to wrangle in some flawed to begin with peg implementation is a great idea.. We'll see.. :/
I would have preferred an all-or-nothing situation, where all proposals except stabilizer are un-funded, rather than the mix we see now.
I believe the mix we see now is due to the decisive blockrades votes that were withdrawn. He's got a powerful stake and his decision alone sinks or floats lots of us developers funding like that.
Am writing a post about the whole thing here currently. When I started looking into it thinking a trend of "favourtism" existed perhaps but found it was other large stakeholder or massive majority votes keeping the currently funded proposals (besides the HBD price ones) in the holy zone. I was certainly discouraged as well man but am going to trudge through it, keep coding on my stuff and build a concise post about it in hopes that greater light is shone on the situation, and more people can understand the ripple effect this seemingly innocent experiment in HBD stabilization might have on the network as a whole.
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STOPTo support your work, I also upvoted your post!
Check out the last post from @hivebuzz:
I hope the HBD situation can settle down. It looks like Steem don't care about SBD as that is going even higher. I've seen others say the HBD price is not such a big issue as people are not really using it, but it seems proposals are the exception. I don't mind you and others making more for a while and am not changing my votes.
Thank you for your unfailing support @steevc, much appreciated!
Thank you for keeping HiveSQL free during this (hopefully short) period of the proposal not being funded.
I also hope it won't last long.
I have set 1 week as a limit and will have to turn it back to subscription mode after that.
Personally, I very much appreciate the work you have been putting into the HiveSQL project. It has benefited many of us. No matter if it will get funded again or not, I just wanna say thank you.
Thank you @drniche