Pros and cons of two versions of Steem Proposal System
I'm going to create two separate posts: one post is for discussion of the relative merits of the two proposals (THIS POST) and a separate post where Steemians can cast their vote for one of the two options by voting for one of the two comments on the post.
The purpose of THIS post is to allow Steemians to discuss two alternative versions of the Steem Proposal System:
- A proposal system that only receives funds via donations
- A proposal system that also additionally receives funds by redirecting funds from existing inflation sources (no new inflation would be added to the system).
[EDIT: The poll is now "live", feel free to cast your votes here:
https://steemit.com/blocktrades/@blocktrades/stake-weighted-poll-for-two-versions-of-steem-proposal-system]
Opinions Here, Voting There
Please post your opinions about these two options on this post only, not on the actual stake-weighted polling post. In order to keep the poll choices clearly visible on the poll post, I will downvote any other comment made on it. I will add a link to the polling post once it's created. This is far from a perfect way to do this, but it's the best I could come up with at the spur of the moment. Maybe someone can create a GUI to do this better later (@dpoll maybe).
I'll run a second poll to get opinions on how to allocate from existing sources if that looks like it's the likely winner of this poll.
If you're wondering why this is a stake-weighted poll, see my comments in the previous post in my blog.
I believe it is too early to consider allocating funds to worker proposals from the inflation.
Having two separate system would make Steem even more complex and would divide the community's attention span into two different money allocation system.
The reason we are in this mess and the "content" rewards seems so misplaced is precisely because nobody at Steemit gave a real though about allowing people to disagree efficiently using their stake once they stumbled on the idea of SMT.
Step 1 one should be implement incentive that makes downvotes cheaper with an UI that doesn't stigmatize disagreement as being evil.
Enough with the placeholder content getting to the front-page with paid votes without a single downvote.
Agreed! Would be great though to already have a WPS to achieve this. Regardless of that, designing the incentive so it's not being abused is the real challenge here (and of course implementing it).
I think if we do the experiment without inflation, we're just going to rapidly find out that inflation is needed. And this will come at the cost of an extra hardfork, which is more expensive than it sounds because it puts the burden on exchanges to upgrade again.
I see the entire "content reward" pool as a potential "Steem ecosystem contribution" fund.
Content is just one type of contribution that I believe we have way to much of.
We could redirect all flagged reward to the fund account and it'd increase benefit to down-voting stakeholder. Currently if one believe that more than 50% of reward is miss-allocated down-voting it just moves around the reward to almost equally undeserving content.
From what I understand we need a monetary incentive and a governance system to decide and implement a better inflation allocation system. None of the dozens of suggestions made in the past were ever discussed or considered seriously due to a lack of someone other than Steemit being able to implement it and their stubborn focus on the wrong priorities like SMT .
Taking an arbitrary % of inflation at this stage is premature when we could be using the same stake weighted voting system we're used to to decide individually how much of the global reward should go to an accumulation account with a more sophisticated management.
I actually like that.
Smooth actually proposed using the proposal system as a means for allocating the inflation, and I thought it was a great idea (search down and you can find it). But I think it's too big a step right now; I think it should be done after we have the proposal system operating.
The way I read about authors getting 20% less is: abusers are 20% easier to flag.
That's just me though...
After reading some of the comments here I wanted to share a system I've been working on for @ocdb. Could probably be the added donation proposal but it could include some inflation and burning and I would love to hear others thoughts on it.
An account that receives donations and votes, it will never sell but instead delegates them to a distribution bot. Donations and votes get powered up and the returns from the bot are collected for funding. This would take donations, inflation through ROI and when/if the time comes it is not needed anymore it would power everything down and send to @null.
I realize that this will not be a lot and there's an extra step to use the ROI instead of the donations directly, but if voters know they are effectively burning Steem in the future they may be more interested to allocate a percentage of the rewardpool through votes. Same thing goes for donations. Maybe we could add "promoted" and "declined rewards" to go to the funding account as well as @theycallmedan mentioned. Add some gamification and statistics plus leaderboards for most donated/beneficiary share that week or an actual minigame that costs Steem to play and it'll add up quickly.
So the reason I prefer this method is cause the incentive is that you burn Steem later, over time that Steem has funded things through generation of ROI from bid bots/distribution bots and later when/if prices are a lot higher it will benefit everyone that the Steem gets burned when the fund isn't needed anymore.
Having said that it's not easy to visualize the difference between this and taking a cut from everyone's rewards and it may not be the best way to kickstart it as it needs some runway.
Opinions are welcomed.
Did you say "gamification" and "leaderboards"? That sounds right up my alley. 😉
Well at least the gamification via leaderboards that is. Actual minigames isn't ground I have treaded just yet.
I do have reservations about anything bid bot as you may already know but am less averse idea of a non-profit one such as @ocdb than users selling votes for profit.
Posted using Partiko Android
I've paid little attention to bidbot economics, spending my attention on issues that I am more interested in, so I am probably failing to grasp this idea completely. That being said, I'm not convinced that using bidbots will prove appropriate for funding essential development of core blockchain infrastructure, due to variation in inflows, as well as potential mismatch with funding needs.
I will give this more thought, and don't consider this initial assessment final. I did want to mention my initial thoughts so that folks might refine my inadequate understanding, or address relevant issues raised.
Thanks!
I'd start the conversation with what Steemit Inc could fund from its accounts.
IIRC, Steemit has said they would consider a 6 million Steem donation, but I think they would like to see an inflation source as part of such a deal. I'm not saying not having one would be a deal breaker, but I got the impression they wanted it.
WHAT IT'S MAN ?
WHAT ARE DOING ?
I second this!
I am in favor of a donation system. I am especially in favor of a donation system where Steemit would be willing to donate a few million Steem (or more) to jump-start the system. It is Steemits personal stake, but the community has shown overwhelming support in taking some of that early mined Steem and put it towards a public worker proposal system. From here we can have declined post go to the rewards, and even add a donation % on the UI when upvoting. If 50%+ of Steemians gave 1-10% of their upvote for the fund, it could add up pretty quickly. How about in the instance there is not enough funds and there is something the community really wants down that requires hiring developers? We could have a raise for something pressing like that. Also adding badges for people that donate, fun stuff on the UI side would further increase donations. Have a donation leader board. ETC.
If the vote turns out to be in favor of taking the funds from a current inflation source, I would be in favor of taking a little from all pools, except for witnesses funds as blockchain security is always concern number one.
Protip: donate with your dapp accounts for extra marketing. :)
I like theycallmedan's idea.
I am supporting a duel system of donations and declined reward (burn post) money to start with. This + a start up stake from Steemit Inc. should be more than enough to see some results so that the community can then better decide if and how much additional funding it should receive.
Using rewards from declined rewards for Steem development is an excellent idea! Perhaps dust as well!
^ Same
Pilot - based on donations/manual transfer from STINC and steemians
Once proven - UI based auto donations from earned rewards - think earning above certain STEEM on a post automatic deduction and under certain amount STEEM with option of opt-out.
Last resort - Temp inflation ( decided on a quarterly basis)
You basically want a TAX at the source are you a french politicans lol :)
that's an idea...
I personally think that Steemit should have control of their own stake. If they choose to delegate to a effort to help pay for open source development, that would be awesome! But it's up to them. Yes, they "ninja mined" their stake, but that's the same thing they've done since, sucked at documentation. That needs to change.
It would be nice if there were something that we could all delegate to, follow their trail, and set as a beneficiary, to reward work on Steem though.
All pools will be carrying the load.
It's 1% of the yearly inflation of 8.574% everyone holding steem will participate.
+1
Can't say anything better 😂
I don't think donations alone will be enough to sustain the Steem Proposal System for the long term. Inflation pulls from the funds of the entire blockchain (everyone holding Steem is essentially paying in proportion to their Steem holdings), whereas donations rely on individuals.
My concern is that basing the system on donations only will lead to a situation where a few people don't feel they should shoulder the costs of proposals that benefit all Steem holders.
It would be possible to design the SPS to initially only take from donations, then later add code to take from inflation if donations are insufficient. But this would require a second hardfork, so it will increase the cost and put more burden on exchanges to update their wallets twice, rather than once.
You gotta consider there is at least 2 realities i steem.
Investors (be it early, ninja, small, huge)
Content creators
Content creators struggle as it is and they are key for having a healthy steem enviroment, without contect creators this place is doomed. (Unless we are not a content drive blockchain anymore and no one told us)
Most of the decisions lately have been made in the interest of the investors, I am a small one so I should not complain one can tell me... Well the way I see it, if we dont start paying attention to those willing to join and stay as content creators what are we going to do? Buy and sell upvotes between us?
Or just play Steem monsters?
Steem seems to be straying outside of its initial path... Is that evolution..?
Agreed,
Donations are no good foundation to implement structural changes for the totality of the steem blockchain.
We are all in it together, the only fair and sane way to achieve this is 1% of inflation.
There is no free lunch, not for the many and not for the few.
Donations might not sustain us for the long term...but it's a start. We don't even know how much we need really right now. We should really get things started and get a better idea of how much we need. This thread is full of great ideas on how to get money for rewards. It might even be possible to roll any proposed changes into other hard forks, or together with updates.
But...it might not even be necessary to do a hard fork to get started. There's a lot of stuff that we need to do anyway.
It wouldn't...unless the system plans on facing what Eth Classic had to deal with: lack of funding.
I favor using current inflation mechanics and allocate a portion on some of the newly generated STEEM. Donation model won't be enough to sustain the proposals.
But the question is what will we cut off? Witness rewards? Author rewards? I am not sure about that topic yet.
On a side note, if you want to have a talk about using dPoll, and need help with organizing or requirements (stake based voting is not there yet, I can focus on shipping it in the next couple of days.) I am on steem.chat as @emrebeyler, and emrebeyler#9263 on Discord.
I'm not comfortable delaying the first poll for too long: I'd like to start it within 24 hours from this post (after we've had enough initial discussion to have informed voting).
But there's a good chance I will want to run more stake-weighted polls in the near future, and if your implementation meets my needs, I'd be very happy to use it. On a related note, it might be a good option to have a way for the poller to specify a "discussion period" before allowing votes (similar to the way I'm delaying the polling post until there's been a chance for everyone to express an opinion here and read other people's ideas).
Also, in case it's not clear, I'm looking for a polling system where people can also read opinions about the poll options from people other than the poller.
I see, current version of dPoll missing 2 features we need:
Both are on to do list and will be deployed upcoming weeks.
Are you thinking it counts the rshares of the votes on said comment or the mvests behind the accounts voting with any %? I've thought about this in the past and the second is obviously better due to voting power never really being at or close to 100% for many accounts on the network.
dpoll doesn't work with upvotes. so the owned vests of the account will be the metric.
Interesting: I didn't know that comments also competed on lists like "hot list" on steemit.
I will make this short
Donations is more sustainable rather than inflation based system. Inflation destroys everything.
Which from the previous post, looks like 20% off author rewards.
It's 1% of total inflation (reward pool).
The inflation is already there. The discussion is only about changing its structure.
they're not adding inflation. they're just rerouting 1% of it to the dev fund pool, which i think is okay, since everyone gets to pay for it. From years of experience, i've found that making something everybody's business will eventually be no one's business. So we need something that works automatically and everyone just moves on.
Donations should be possible, both targeted (for specific proposal) and general (to reward pool), however there is no way this would suffice for any serious development. The funding needs to be more predictable. Therefore taking part of inflation is the way to go. The question remains which one of current inflation targets is to be reduced to make way for development fund.
Witness rewards pay for upkeep of the servers and for work of witnesses. This is the backbone of the whole ecosystem and therefore cannot be touched.
Interest part of inflation sets optimal level of vesting. If the ratio of vested Steem to all Steem is lower than percentage of inflation going to interest, then those with vested Steem gain purchasing power, if the relation is opposite, owners of vested Steem lose purchasing power, just a bit slower than those with liquid Steem. Note that liquid Steem can be, well, liquidated much easier than vested, therefore interest has to outweigh the risk of keeping Steem in ice. Whales are naturally restricted in movement of their funds, they require deep market to operate, however their operations have profound influence, therefore it pays to give them incentive to keep their Steem frozen. Minnows on the other hand should not have any strong incentives to keep their funds in vested form because it is damaging in two ways. First: vested funds cannot be used as currency. If minnows (that are much more important target for merchants than whales) keep their funds frozen, they can't spend, which thwarts development and recognition of Steem as viable mean of trade. Second: interest going to vested funds of minnows is not an incentive for them (because it is too small), yet due to sheer numbers it cuts interest going to whales, reducing their incentive for freezing funds. To sum it up: interest part of inflation cannot be cut, if anything it should be increased. The minnow part of argument will be needed later.
Commenters are basically authors, just publishing in different place. Authors are the meat of Steem. Steem would be just another crypto if not for authors. While there is plenty of people that will create content for free, for recognition alone or to vent their creative spirit, real professional quality content requires money. If Steem has an ambition to attract content on the level of f.e. YouTube, it has to pay the authors on the same level. It is extremely far from it (IMHO the 7 day limit is responsible in big part) and yes, it needs to grow first. Reducing rewards paid to authors would be a step in wrong direction.
That leaves us with curation rewards. Many people feel these are small, which is true, because there is a lot of curators. In fact, in order to pull anything noticable from curation mechanism, one has to resort to use of bots. The question is what value does curation have to be worth paying for? The answer is: none. Running around and clicking "like" button is not work, passing your voting power and relying on algorithm to choose the content that is likely to give maximum payout instead of what you actually like is not work either. Zero work deserves zero pay. In all systems that have "likes" people use them with no monetary incentive. In fact I'm pretty confident that users would still use "likes", even if that transferred small amount of Steem from them to the authors. After all people actually pay for content they consume.
Did it rub you the wrong way? You are not a curator like that, you scan through the content and read everything personally to choose only the best, "most deserving" posts? There is a solution for you. Start making aggregate posts, f.e. if you curate posts about nice places to travel to, make posts that link to posts describing such places, organize competitions, build your recognition and if you are as good a curator as you think you are you will be rewarded from the pool for authors. There is no need for curation rewards.
Curation rewards can be wholly consumed by pool for development. This will kill the curation bots, make the flow of "likes" more reflect actual popularity of the content and decrease the incentives of minnows to keep their funds in frozen state (see above).
Interesting thought.
Completely agree with you here. The average content consumer will never be a whale, why would they be? I don't believe we will ever motivate the average Steem consumer to power up sizable amounts of SP beyond $50 worth. Let's say they buy $100 in Steem today and get 333 SP, that's still just in the $0.01 upvote range and they're only getting 25% of that amount. If they upvoted content optimally with no less than 300 upvotes per month, exactly 10 upvotes per day at the end of a year they would have around $9. Would that be worth it to you?
I'm not saying we do away with curation rewards, but if we have to diminish any pool in favor of a dev fund, I'd choose curators. Honestly, I believe the concept of Steem appeals primarily to content creators hoping to earn on Steem, not content consumers that don't want to produce content. The problem for why we're not taking off all that fast is that we are not intriguing content consumers enough. But I don't think curation rewards are going to solve that, I think we have to empower them and give them access to cool stuff. Steem Monsters is one example of doing this well, but we need a lot more cool features that make Steem fun for audiences.
I have now managed to read all the comments here, and have realized some things that haven't been addressed.
First, there are going to be stages that the funding mechanism goes through, and this will necessitate that the funding mechanism(s) evolve over time to reflect not only the need to develop evolving, but what funding mechanisms evolve, how the community evolves, and more. There is an initial period, and then those things that come after. Initially the only reasonable funding mechanism is donations, as we have very little data to base other mechanisms on.
Second, funding from inflation is not ideal, and over the long term funding from donations will prove both inadequate (IMHO) and unwieldy, with too much need to promote fundraising. IRL promotions suck up as much as 90% of funds, with only what isn't spent to promote donating left to fund whatever is sought to be funded. This doesn't work IRL, and it won't work on Steem.
Third, neither proposed mechanism accurately reflects the reality of stake, and this prevents funding proportionately from the beneficiaries of the funding. VP is based on stake, and funding should be too. Just as unused VP fails to take advantage of inflation, so basing funding on inflation fails to base funding on the stake that will benefit from it.
The only reasonable source of funding for development that will benefit stakeholders is stake itself. Drawing funding from inflation will reduce incentive to create, curate, and witness, all negative impacts on the ability of the blockchain to grow and incentivize investment. Taxing stake itself proportionately funds development from those that will proportionately benefit from it. It motivates stakeholders to attend to ensuring funds are used efficiently, and prevents stake that is not used to benefit the community from receiving disproportionate benefits from funds spent on development, which all other funding mechanisms will do.
Only taxing stake directly will preclude increasing the financial incentive to do no creation, curation, or witnessing. Funding development via inflation directly does this.
Lastly, taxing stake directly provides certainty to investors. They will know that development is in their hands, and that will give them complete control of the potential gains their stake can realize. Since approving funding will be based on VP, which directly reflects stake, the stakeholders will control funding and the benefits of that funding will inure to them proportionately. Since they have authority for funding, they also have responsibility equally. No other mechanism fails to obscure that responsibility, and is directly proportional to the stake having authority to effect it.
Thanks!
So instead of creating new currency you want to take currency away from everyone?
The end result would be the same with how inflation works, but if you loose your stake over time, I don't think that would fly.
I'm not sure I understand how you envision this but it sounds like a passive fee on powering up STEEM?
Fantastic take... I hope more people read this?
Witnesses? @blocktrades, @reggaemuffin, others...
I'm responding to the ping but not sure what to make of this. Either the funding is confused with the distribution, which is most likely in my opinion. Or the idea is to have SP holders pay a holding fee basically. And I don't think that that will work.