I had the good blessing of catching another conversation in the crypto and cola show this time hosted by @peaceandmoney. I suspect that for some of the community members of Hive these type of virtual gatherings are not only informative, which is a given, but also therapeutic, which may actually be more important at the moment.
Discussing the current state of the market was, of course, the main agenda, but eventually the conversation landed again on the infamous DHF--The way we fund development and growth for our dear blockchain.
I did however attempt to share what I think might be a parallel to solution to the conversations we keep on having about our DHF, and even though I think my idea fell on infertile ground (ptsd of a kind more on this later), I feel like attempting to write it out in a post with the hopes of polishing it a bit more. If a good conversations sparks from this, I will know I'm not chasing shadows after all.
Identifying shortcomings
The constant issue we all seem to have with our beloved DHF, is that we truly have no way of making sure these funds get used properly, efficiently. As things are today, we only know how much a project is getting from the funds, but don't really know if any work is being done.
A system to track, if you will, the progress of a proposal has not been implemented as of yet. And, as hard as I may try, I'm having a hard time coming up with a pragmatic way of implementing one.
It was not me who said it first, I'm sure, but these funds are not truly investments for development, since we can't measure ROI on them, but more like grants.
Because of this fact we've seen over the years what we can only describe as waste, fraud and abuse. It would seem like we could use some DOGE over here these days.
At any rate, there's a whole different conversation to be hard regarding how we fund development directly, and I'm willing to accept I don't have a good idea to share on this front, at least not with tweaks to our current system.
That being said, what I shared on today's hangout, what I intend to share here, is not precisely about the DHF, but something that could co-exist along side it.
At the expense of triggering people's PTSD, allow me to remember Steemit Inc, and little ol @ned.
Steemit Inc and Delegations
Maybe someone can clarify my suspicion, but I think the way Steemit did things evolved naturally. I really don't think there is a version of the white paper that lays out how Steemit Inc was to incentivize development. But, those of us who have been around long enough probably remember it quite well.
Sometimes it was one post, sometimes a few, but a project developed on Steem sought it's funding by appealing to Steemit Inc and gaining a healthy delegation from them.
Say what you will of projects like @dmania or @dlike, but their creators did quite well for themselves with those launches. But the main point I'm trying to make is that they had to do the work first, before seeing a single token come their way.
Also, they had to constantly be sharing updates, promoting engagement for their projects, because they all knew that if their efforts fell flat, the delegation would vanish into thin air in a second.
We are not privy to the conversations in the now infamous slack, but I'm sure that staying in good grace of @ned was part of everyone's routine.
All this said, I'm not advocating for a @ned of sorts to make this important decisions. Suggesting such a thing would be antithetical to what we are trying to do. My intention is only to point out an alternative to funding from the DHF as we are currently doing.
Democratic Delegations
What if we are all @ned, what if we had a way to implement a delegation system alongside DHF. What could be the downside to such a thing?
The way I see it, we would effectively have a way to "try out" a project idea, by reducing the cost risk for us. Does that make any sense?
Picture this.
@edicted and I decide to launch a game on Hive, and work for months on a minimal viable product. It's a fighting game, stick figures that move comically attempting to behead each other.
Think "Fight Club" with an element of gambling. Fighters put HBD in the pot, and the winner of the fight takes the money minus the tiny percentage of the house.
Just like it was the case with Splinterlands, Hive is used to record the fights, workout the payouts, etc. While the animation and game itself runs on a separate server.
The initial investment for this project would then be on us, on "the developers" the "entrepreneurs", but if we get enough momentum, enough users engaging with our little game, it stands to reason that applying for a delegation to help both with RC's and costs would make sense.
The proper use of this delegation would be clearly verifiable for anyone who would want to check.
- Are we actively working on engagement?
- Are we constantly updating the game, improving it
- Are we posting updates, road maps, changes, concerns, issues?
Do you see where I'm going with this?
It would also stand to reason that if the project went dormant, if engagement dropped off, the people voting on the "Democratic Delegation" would unvote it, and if support dropped beyond a certain percentage, that would trigger the undelegation of the hive power.
Is this perfect?
Of course not and it can be abused. Let's not forget the whole @dlive debacle. But, I submit to you it's a lot harder to abuse it than the grants we are currently giving out.
Also, and this is important, not all projects requesting delegations for growth have to be gargantuan in size. I’m sure there are plenty of project ideas one can come up with, ideas that would possibly aid in user engagement here or even attract more people to our blockchain.
It’s easy for me to imagine a community project like the ones we once had here acquiring a small (when being compared to DHF costs, that is) delegation to curate its members' efforts. This was precisely how projects like @c-squared, @qurator and yes even @helpie came about.
Conclusion
Of course I would need an experienced voice to address this, but I suspect the implementation of this is not that complicated– not really. And I think I’ve made a strong case for the reduction of cost risk if such a system was an alternative to the grants we are handing out.
I would love to hear from actual developers (not me, long retired) on this very subject, to calculate the time cost of adding this feature into an upcoming fork.
Please, feel free to disagree with me. Please poke holes in the idea, because in the end good ideas survive scrutiny.
Thanks for reading my friends
MenO
If you have any ideas for apps/tools that will help progress hive you can submit them to @ecoinstant group synergy builders using a one time payment of 100 ARCHON.
Check out the last post of his https://peakd.com/hive-186392/@ecoinstant/is-this-worth-money-6-tag-engagement-chaser-tec
There have been some awesome free to use tools developed by the team so far and 100 ARCHON is pretty dang cheap right now to have a tool developed. Check out the page! https://thecrazygm.com/hivetools/
I recommend all the bots that have been built on this platform Hive world, must pay back all the coins they earn in all Hive world pasein, only the pages that are under the real person can earn, you have to self-introduce and that is the key, since we have AI and massively fake robotized pages, a single person has the apsurd to fight such a system.. the only thing that brings stability robots have to take away from earning... I'm not F..k machine like them 🤷♂️
can't think of a single way we could eliminate kill all the bots, without killing the platform too... but I understand your frustration.
I recall the Stewards of Gondor, in which modest delegations were provided a team of manual curators, who upvoted content they liked. Some of these curators tried to swindle the delegator by colluding for V4V scams, and some of them even just upvoted themselves with the delegations, but these guys were caught and the delegations removed. Generally I recall that the SoG delegations worked well, but that the flagwars at the time embroiled the principal sponsor and took precedence.
How would a delegation be of use to a game dev startup? RC's aren't much of a concern, but if they were a limitation I can see how delegations would easily resolve that. I don't see how delegations would defray costs. They're not donations.
Thanks!
when dtube came about, they paid for all their infra through curation. Their account would have to, by design, be upvoting content creators to make any tokens. So, they had to come up with a way to upvote real people, good content, etc.
In a game, I guess it would be somewhat the same. A curation team upvoting players. Real players, not spammy bots.
I guess I forgot about curation rewards, which isn't nothing. Sometimes I think my head is in the clouds, but when I look around to enjoy the view, everything is brown, and I realize it's somewhere else.
Either way, sometimes it's not screwed on right, LOL
We are sucking on the same slurpee my friend.
I love this idea. And have spoken often about the shift away from delegations in general.
To be fair, I was more referring to delegations to new users as a type of onboarding mentor program.
I won a little contest in my early days and received a temporary delegation… that feeling of being able to offer a better reward to other users was both motivating and beneficial to my account growth.
It really enabled me to see the potential of hive (steem then)
So yes, your idea of delegations as a DHF tool is very intriguing to me.
I love the recent interest and engagement that is bubbling lately.
Hopefully eyes 👀 beyond this Butt’s will stumble into your post!
well bro, let's get the convo rolling. Write about this idea, poke holes in it, add more salsa to the nachos.
This is how it eventually reaches critical mass. More and more people talking about it.
The biggest hole is probs… ‘great, but who are we’. Or ‘great, then code the change’
Basically I’ve seen many great ideas over the years.
But a lack of influence or ability to action.
The idea is solid.
And it doesn’t even mean changing the existing system. It’s more just another tool in the tool shed.
I could also see this idea as a first phase pre getting a dhf proposal grant.
A little proof of action pre proposal.
I may have a wee idea for a baby chair at the big boys table 👶
I’ll DM you this weekend 😎
This is actually a really smart one Meno. Letting projects prove themselves with delegations before getting full funding makes way more sense than just handing out grants blindly. It's going to be kind of like "put in the work first" approach. Very nice Meno
is pretty much how life works...
absolutely that's exactly how life works 💪💯 wise Meno