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.
Redirecting some of the existing inflation would be a great way to fund proposals regardless of human actors.
Trusting that users will donate is in my opinion an already failed proposition. Voting would not work if people pay out of their wallets.
Do you think future chains/projects of this kind will start out with a % of the 'inflation pool' allotted for maintainance / dev / marketing / etc in the form of WP?
It seems like an oversight not to have started out this way, but perhaps I'm being harsh with hindsight.
@blocktrades Mostly delegation power holders of voting bots are getting free reward from power of @freedom i think all burden should not be on authors some percentage from curators some from witness and some from authors
i am not in favourite of This new rule it will destroy the interest of investors specially if price of steem not rise
The prime reason for creating the Steem Proposal System is to make Steem more attractive as a blockchain and thereby raise the price of Steem.
I think the solution is in plain sight to make this blockchain more attractive. We get rid of the vote selling power structure and implement promotion in the front end the right way.
This doesn't require any complex worker proposal. It requires influential stakeholders like you, @blocktrades, to realize the gold mine you are setting on, that is a fully realized and working Proof-of-Brain distribution for Steem.
Y'all get rid of the bid bots ROI and get users off their butts curating (gotta kill the bot ROI to do that) and I guarantee you will create a wave of bullishness this platform has not seen.
One of which will not be fueled by hype and empty speculation but a revolutionary system of rewarding users that isn't busted.
How attractive do you think a social media platform is when users perceive the reward are rigged to favor those that willfully undermine Proof-of-Brain.
Collusive voting and bid bots two of the foremost problem on this chain not just with trending but distribution as well.
When people take their
sand out of the groundHEADS OUT OF THE SAND 🤦 🤦 and fix that (could be a combo of tech solutions and self-policing), our blockchain will be ready for the moon shot.I am doubtful anything until then will be just a bandaid over a festering wound.
Isn't it obvious that we should attempt pure donations first and then try for more aggressive forms of funding if it's warranted?
The Steemit account still has 35 million coins left and sits at 100% voting power. Can we expect that funding might come from this source?
Would waste more time and then eventually require another hardfork to build an agressive form of funding. History has proven that free-will donations aren't as effective when some people do not take the burden on their shoulders to promote it. That's additional work and i'd rather people just went about their normal work and let the whole thing automate itself. Someone proposed a different approach by taxing stakes proportionately (which might also be a great option given that there are a lot of huge stakes that aren't being used for anything at all). Your take?
My take is that steem-problems-can-t-be-fixed-with-hard-forks
There is no reason to be hard-forking Steem for this.
Steem needs to be simpler.
There is no excuse to tamper with the foundation of the platform simply to allocate funds somewhere.
The entire point of second layer tokens is to fund these side projects.
Any talk of reallocating money on a fundamental level is automatically going to lead me to believe that the people in charge are trying to siphon more money to themselves.
Is there a way the proposal system can generate revenue? Some sort of fee for proposing? Some sort of mechanism where people can bet on the probability of a proposal being accepted? Prediction markets?
The current plan is to charge a 10 SBD fee to create a proposal. The prediction market you're talking about is something someone "could do", but it's definitely beyond the scope of our proposal.
The fee in my opinion should be higher. $100-500 to discourage low quality proposals. That is unless there are competing proposal systems being worked on besides the Blocktrades design. In which case they'd have to compete.
I'm not currently in favor of funding it by way of inflation or dilution unless the design includes supply sinks. In other words, does it lock up Steem? Does it burn Steem? Does it generate a reduction in the liquid Steem to balance the cost in inflation? If it does that then a case can be made.
I think all proposals should have a business plan section. In that section the developers of the proposal should indicate whether or not there is a revenue generating mechanism to their code. This could be locking up Steem, burning Steem, or similar. If it's just code for money with no revenue plan? I don't think we can afford to do that at this time.
Prediction markets give something back in that it expands the economy. It allows new ways to earn and spend Steem which can increase demand for Steem. The proposal I don't really know the impact it would have on the price of Steem or the supply of Steem. If it can be done in such a way that at every opportunity it locks Steem up (reducing supply) then I'd be for it but if it means more Steem being sold to pay for more developers then this is more downward pressure on the price of Steem which discourages the share value.
In other words, people want to get paid in stocks but then the price of the stock goes to zero eventually.
If the percentage is taken only by authors to focus on programmers then it is denied to the account of marketing and writers and the whole system can fall. Costs are reduced, but few users focus on marketing and promotion of the whole system, there are few such authors on the whole Steemit. I am an entrepreneur all my life, without promotion and marketing, nothing can be done.
When the mass of users who have an interest is attracted then we have a lot of investors, that's the whole point, and I'm just listening about the programs and developers and these stories are totally uninteresting for the average users.
How can it be for money? Can I attract more clients?
Can it be done on Steemit affiliate marketing that will bring new users and investors to Steemit while at the same time motivating customers to invest in Steem Power?
The only promotions are the applications that are being made, the point is that the money and profits from the writing work are never shortened, it is best to be equal and to introduce a marketing progressive affiliate from one part of the profit.
I think we have a lot of focus on reducing costs, but little about strategy and marketing. We need to separate the system that will reward promoters and this will help all of us and Steem blockchain that the Steem value grows as well as the number of users and investors.
The most important thing is that we all sincerely say our experience because in this way we can find the best solution.
The funding system should not be viewed as focusing on programmers. It MAY provide funding for programmers, but it can also provide funding for marketing or even authors (the latter would require either an automated off-chain distribution process or a further hard fork to allow funding proposals to pay into the social reward pool, but both are absolutely feasible).
The proper way to view this (funding system) is as an alternate method of voting for rewards that is structurally better suited to potentially larger and/or longer-lived projects than 7 day post payouts.
I realize this is somewhat radical but my own opinion is that 100% of the social reward pool (author+curator) should go into the funding system first, and then stakeholders can vote how much of the inflation budget goes to these forms of marketing (which is what they are) as opposed to other forms of marketing and/or other uses of the budget (such as blockchain development).
Your "radical" idea is actually a simple and brilliant solution to the issue I was pondering of how to allow the relative inflation parameters to be voted on dynamically (it could be applied to amounts of the other inflation sources too). It probably is too radical for many people at the moment, but I'd support the idea.
I think we could consider moving to it if and when the funding/budget system is proven, including shown itself able to fund a variety of useful value-add for Steem. Once that is demonstrated then it makes a lot of sense to look at social rewards in such a context.
Applying it to witness rewards is more problematic because of the circularity/bootstrapping problem. Without reliable witnesses you don't have a secure blockchain on which to conduct the voting or operate the budget system. Some blockchain projects have and are proposing to allow the substructure to be mutated by stakeholder vote, and this could be okay, but it is far more complex and riskier.
I think that's a great idea! And agree that transitioning to it after the WP system is proven would be a good decision.
Posted using Steeve, an AI-powered Steem interface
Imagine 15% to go on affiliate in the future....
Affiliate payments can be voted via a budget system, as well as funding to develop code for it, if that's what stakeholders believe is a good use of funds.
I reckon that there are a couple kinds of potential funding that may be beneficial to stakeholders. Some endeavors are essential and unavoidable to the entire community, and these might be budgeted from the inflation mechanism you propose. There are also less critical matters than infrastructural development, and amongst these items may be affiliate marketing programs, marketing itself, and etc.
I suspect that a mix of funding solutions will prove ideal, with some things being comparable to roads and defense in a national budget, and others comparable to welfare or education - less fundamental to governance - and more appropriately funded via donations, or mechanisms less unavoidable than simply taking a cut of all inflation.
I would like to see more proposals over time, and expect the community and particularly the @steemalliance working group to put more forth as folks give more thought to these issues, and am confident ongoing discussions and polls will be requisite to successfully determining our eventual course(s) of action.
Initially, I believe we can expect donations from @steemit (and possibly other stakeholders) that will be adequate to get the ball rolling. At this time I don't think we have adequately considered these issues, or have nominal data to examine regarding proposals, to effect long term solutions.
I look greatly forward to your own considerations along these lines, and believe the cut from overall inflation will be necessary to effect core infrastructural development in exactly the way you propose. However, the community has demonstrated various voluntary mechanisms of funding developments, and while such purely organic, voluntary devices certainly should continue, we would probably benefit highly from hybrid mechanisms that more formally potentiate folks regularly contributing to systemic developments of less critical infrastructure.
I also agree that witness funding should remain separate from either type of funding mechanism, in order that any problems with funding the security of the blockchain aren't obscured or complicated by the novel mechanisms we are here considering.
Thanks!
Step by step
amazing
I'm wondering about how the results will turn out as many people are delegating their power away and thus can't participate in the poll with most of their stake.
@blocktrades - shouldn't it be based on stake owned? Especially considering such an important question about the future of the whole blockchain. Or do you expect everybody to quickly undelegate in order to be able to participate fully? That brings high financial (opportunity) costs and is thus impractical.
Posted using Steeve, an AI-powered Steem interface
Yes, it's not a completely accurate measurement, and it will severely impact the vote of a couple of the largest stake holders (me being one of them, freedom being the other really large one). But as I mentioned elsewhere, the @dpoll guy is working on a true stake weighted system, and if the vote looks at all close, I can probably get him to run his code on the voters for each post (or even repeat the poll on his system).
Based on informal polling before this, I think I know the outcome already and I don't think it will be close (except for the one big question of which way freedom will vote). But a formal poll like this allows people to put their opinion "on the record" at least, to reduce dispute of the choice.
version 1 imho
Would like to see it funded and am fine with most coming from Author rewards, but since we still have plenty of witnesses and back up witnesses, maybe some of the funding should come from curation and witness rewards also.
Either way, I think SPS is good and I think funding it is a must.
Curation rewards should not be reduced under any circumstance. So few people curate content because curation rewards are low. Taking from authors is really the only reasonable option.
I happen to strongly disagree. I note rewarding curation so as to potentiate focusing on profitability actually inhibits curation that focuses on quality of content. While I don't have a specific and demonstrable proposal to put forward, I note the gamification of curation has created the extant trending page, which I am confident no one finds optimal.
Curation rewards may not need to be reduced, but it may also be that curation would be improved were curation rewards eliminated altogether. I do hope that communities and SMTs will soon enable testing of various parameters so as to generate data and support improving curation to limit the impact of mere profiteering on content generation. There are various essential social values that aren't adequately superable via the extant curation mechanism, and we need more data before we can determine what precisely those are, and how best to effect them.
Further, values aren't ubiquitous, and no one shares the exact suite of values weighted identically with anyone. Given how curating content effects societal values, I am sure a spectrum of curative mechanisms will eventually prove optimal. Society is far more, and more valuable, than finance and economic factors alone.
Edit: there are accounts on the blockchain that neither post nor comment, but do curate. Limiting support mechanisms to author rewards alone gives such accounts a free ride. Since such accounts likely have very little support from the community anyway, taxing the rest of the community going forward greatly increases the relative power such accounts will have in the future.
Also, some accounts don't upvote at all, and the entirety of their impact on the blockchain is flagging. I am presently struggling to properly qualify the impact such accounts will have on the kinds of proposals we are considering in these comments, but, unless the inflationary impact of such accounts contribute to such proposals as we eventually adopt, we will financially reward accounts whose only purpose is to effect censorship.
I certainly don't want that, and don't think anyone does.
It comes down to providing the right balance of incentives. At the moment passive income (vote selling, delegating to bots) is higher than contributing to the platform through curation. It is roughly three times higher. Adjusting curation rewards up to somewhere closer to passive income will provide incentive for users to be active. 50/50 split between authors and curators has been suggested. I am not convinced that will be sufficient to pull delegation from bots. I think 75% curation will be effective if combined with several other changes such as separate downvote pool and SBD included in payout to curators. Someone mentioned 100% curation rewards but I believe that would kill the incentive to create content.
A much higher curation reward will most likely increase the incentive to frontrun bots, thus reducing bot curation rewards. Frontrunners could be earning well over 100% of rewards per vote, which will be higher than any bot could offer. If bots are only getting 2/3 of the curation rewards and offering a positive ROI, they could be earning less than the 75% curation reward. The incentives to operate and delegate to bots will be greatly reduced.
Downvotes would be more effective as well as the downvote will reduce rewards to the curator. Curators are more likely to upvote content they feel will not be downvoted. This is another reason why downvotes should not penalise the downvoter. At the moment downvoting is close to non-existent. If downvotes were free, i.e. separate downvote pool, people would be more likely to use them.
Thanks for your comment. It is good to see another perspective on the matter. I think this response covers your other comment as well.
Actually, I would like curation rewards to be bigger too.
Would be nice if the price went up and everyone could see more value.
I also disagree, authors leave left and right because they realize its not as profitable as Steem makes itself appear. You have to remember that Steem's first and most important niche market is the internet's bloggers/vloggers/podcasters and artists of various kinds. Essentially, the key user is the blog owner of a wordpress blog, but Steem is already failing them because the Steem community does not get that they need to focus on this specific customer.
Wordpress bloggers are exactly who you should care about pleasing. This is why Engrave is probably the most under appreciated dark horse project on Steem, they understand the primary user of Steem: wordpress bloggers. This user is willing to buy some SP (not whale levels, but it adds up) in order to build a reputation and presence on Steem and they will be key customers for bid bots, causing an effective circulating internal economy. They build Steem's brand name by association and bring products and services to Steem.
I had a quick look at the Engrave website. It looks pretty interesting. I really think Steem is the land of opportunity. The biggest challenge is to fix the ecosystem to better align rewards with value added.
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It's a misconception to think only the author's are cut.
We all carry the load.
If you hold steem, you are paying proportionally to the 1% of total inflation to make further development possible.
Actually, this is more true than you may consider. The severity of the risk in taking from author rewards is that you're also taking away from all the businesses running frontends that utilize beneficiary rewards from author income. So this suggestion will hit dtube, dsound, steemblr, Engrave, eSteem and any other projects operating on the beneficiary model.
A 11-20% income drop for authors is the same for those businesses, which could be a deal breaker...
I am hesitant to tax witnesses to support development, although I am not certain that it is inappropriate either. Witnesses are somewhat akin to national defense metaphorically, as they are the mechanism that secures the blockchain against threats, foreign and domestic. Not only does taxing witnesses potentially obscure the impact of witness funding on blockchain security, and thus make it more difficult to effect security, but witnesses have demonstrable vested interest in certain types of development, and any financial incentive to compromise security for profit should be avoided at all costs.
Considerable funding is appropriated witnesses, and there should remain a stark and immutable separation between that funding and funding for development. Insofar as witnesses have stake, they also are taxed via their posts, comments, and votes, proportionally to the rest of the community. Further taxing our defense mechanism not only engenders the aforementioned hazards, but will effectively decrease the actual motivation provided them to effect our mutual defense.
Neither increasing the potential profitability of various developments to them non-proportionally, nor disincetivizing effecting the defense of the blockchain are acceptable proposals to me, although there is no reason to not consider witness rewards separately from funding development. As you may feel (as your comment seems to indicate) that witnesses are rewarded out of proportion to their contribution to the blockchain, such discussion may be appropriate.
Confusing development and security funding will not make such considerations easier.
agreed.. if the funding was done in proportion to each groups percentage of the inflation pool then it would still mean that the author pool pays the most BUT each group would contribute something ... seems to be a more equitable distribution for the good of the platform.
ditto ...Coming from witness rewards? Good Idea! We could use that number and take it from that. Since they gain the most from the platform.
Donations and a development post (as well as a couple comments) to be upvoted each day by the crowd. I like that much better than an inflation filled fund.
I'm just happy a big change is a community involved decision.
I would however be in favour of a proportional decrease on all inflation measures to reach a 5-10% of total inflation funding level e.g. a 6% cut to all inflation sources redirected to fund the account
IMHO - redirecting inflation is the way to go on this.
The inflation method essentially creates a constant faucet which will trickle funds in at a predictable rate which can then be used to plan/budget (in STEEM values obviously, but not Fiat equivalents).
If the system were to rely on donations exclusively, the rate at which proposals could be funded would be complete unknown and donors would have to be solicited/engaged over time to make it work. That's an incredible amount of effort/politics, which could complicate things and ultimately lead to the failure of the WPS (e.g. donor donates to general fund, doesn't approve of what was funded with donation, refuses to donate again).
The source of the inflation should be the post rewards pool (author/curation rewards), since it makes up the bulk of inflation and has the most subjective value/impact on the platform.
The rate will still be unknown given the fluctuating (sometimes extremely so) Steem price. Maybe somewhat less unknown than with donations, but in some cases it could even be more so (donators might contribute more, in STEEM units, to pay for important work if needed to make up for a falling Steem price)
I still don't think donations alone are a good approach.
Agreed, and I meant to imply only STEEM values (not Fiat values) throughout my entire post.
I agree.
LOL. i doubt they would.. lol. Automation is the way to go.
I'm not a bright man. But this seems genius to me.
I agree on this.
Donations are good but is necessary for a developer to know an estimation of what can expect to receive.
Redirecring inflation makes sense to me.
From which part is hard to tell..
PS. I've rethinked the part that the actors with big SP can game the system in their favor.. I'm not sure about the answer now.
Lovely comment @jesta !
Agreed!
The best system imo would be to redirect a % of the current inflation to the SPS, this would mean that we would know how much $ the proposal would get and since it is a % of the current inflation system it would go out of everyone's pockets, and not the author's alone, curators alone or witnesses alone! Everyone would contribute!! Because we are all part of the ecosystem! On this blockchain, there are curators only, authors only and witnesses only! We should all contribute!
Now, let's wait an see how this will go forward... this will be a very good and clear indicator of how much centralization in SP and power we got on STEEM... It will be a good indicator of how corrupt the current system is... Let's see if only the authors get screwed or if the $ comes out of everyone's pockets... If we are all rowing or if some people are just in the boat to go on a pleasure ride and let the others row...I'm buying myself some popcorns to watch this...
The 1% should be a cumulative addition from every reward pool on the chain. Witnesses, Authors, curators, etc. I even read about taxing stakes proportionately, which i think might be a great idea, given that there are a lot of inactive whales who will benefit by doing nothing.
Exactly! But their main proposal was taking only out of the authors rewards, which would be wrong! If they take 1% they should take 33% from each of the inflations (curators, authors and witnesses)... this is a community, so we should all be rowing together!! And not get the minnows and authors rowing for the whales and curators!
Ok, this bot is new ahaha
Isn't the entire point of having witnesses earn Steem/SP so that they can continue to run servers/validate stuff/get paid for their time?
Not sure why we can't do the same thing with upvotes. If enough dolphins and a few whales got together and did 100% upvotes on posts they could easily fund things.
If you think you can fund it only by donations would be better. If not you should get a little from authors, curators, witnesses.🏦
IT'S GOOD YOU TOOK ACTION! 💖
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.
I agree completely with this. There are too many unknowns regarding what to develop, how much funding that will require, and much, much more, to reasonably be able to make sound decisions presently.
Thanks!
I am in favor of using some of the inflation that is currently going to authors. Rewards are the backbone of steem, but it's still early days and the focus should be on development right now. People are saying that they wish that steemit, inc donates to the SPS. This is not going to happen guys, they won't donate huge amounts. Even if they do, it's not sustainable. Donations from other people will be almost impossible to get.
Bid bots making lots of money on steemit. They fucking ROI system. I think bid bots should pay extra tax and it's a good idea instead of cutting reward of authors.
Take a cut from evryone:
And plus donations.
In this way everyone will be equaly unsatisfied, that is a sign of a good deal :)
@blocktrades I am in favor of the donations route............
Thank you @blocktrades for taking this up. Really glad to hear that you were able to agree with Steemit Inc on financing the development of the SPS.
For my part, I'm clearly in favor of redirecting funds from the author reward pool towards the SPS, provided that both, the total percentage made available and the actual allocation of funds towards the individual proposals are approved by stake-weighted voting.
@blocktrades people specially those people who pay for buy upvote they invest in steem and they buy steem for the purpose of some profit they make from writing articles decreasing their profit will destroy interest of authors in steemit , In other case if steem price hike then no problem every one will be happy
I agree with the 1% of the total yearly inflation (reward pool) to use as funding to secure and lead the steem blockchain into a prosperous future.
I also agree to take a cut from the 4.467% Author Rewards to 3.515%.
@blocktrades very bad idea what author will earn from steemit.
Price of Steem will increase. Authors will benefit a lot.
Actually, it is impossible to guarantee such increase. The price of Steem is not set by how good development is alone, and how much funding is dedicated to development doesn't determine the quality of development either. Far too many variables impact Steem price to logically support your statement.
True many factors determine the price of Steem. Better development will encourage investors and therefore have a positive impact on price. A net positive increase in price is not guaranteed but a relative increase to what it would have been had there been no development is highly likely. Of course we can never tell for sure as we won't have 2 scenarios to compare.
I supported to this your under mentioned proposal and think this definitely bring some changes to the current scenario of market.
Tax the authors/curators... why not? We’re the peasants anyways making peanuts. Just spit on the 99% and do what the whales want. It’s no different in the real world. 🤷🏼♂️🤣
tax the bid bots to fund it
i agree
I think receiving funds via donations only won't really be a good idea.. What's the guarantee that everyone will be donated to?
There is no guarantee, quiet right, my son. :)
This will never happen. The cheapa$$ that I am knows that I will never donate to something like this, and have a feeling 99% of others will feel the same way and without one or two big donations it will never happen.
I think this is a necessary pain to help grow the platform, attract new talent, and create a better Steem for all. As much as I'm against it I know in the long run it could be a good thing for Steem.
What about both? Redirecting some of the new steem and receiving donations to reward bounties for development. The foundation could make investments in prospective steem businesses with terms to send a portion of their profits back to the development foundation.
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One of the two proposals is for funding from both sources(existing inflation + donations). The other proposal is to only have funding from donations. Accepting funds from donations isn't controversial, so both proposals include that option.
I am still reading comment here, and haven't yet considered all I need to. I would like to know how you intend to specify budget items, whether you intend to use the vote to seek implementation of funding mechanisms for the foreseeable future, or to implement mechanisms that evolve over time as information, needs, and the community changes.
I am presently fairly certain that initially only donations are going to be acceptable, until we're able to discuss and specify budgets, accountability, and deliverables. However, I am vacillating on taxing witness funding, and find the failure to include a tax on stake unacceptable.
Accounts that neither create nor curate aren't going to fund either proposed mechanism, and yet the greater stake held in an account the greater the benefit to that account of whatever is funded. I am coming to think that funding from inflation is not the right mechanism at all, but directly taxing stake is. Doing so motivates stakeholders to directly act to ensure funds are spent wisely, and reflects proportionally the benefits accorded by funding to those doing the funding. Further, it does not reduce incentive to create content, nor curate it. Lastly, accounts that neither create, witness, nor curate, aren't increased in financial power relative to those that do, and unless stake is taxed directly that will be the undeniable result.
Please consider a direct tax on stake as a funding mechanism as an additional option to be discussed, and voted in the future.
I understand why authors would not want to take a cut from their allocation from the inflation but please keep in mind that the monetary value comes from those buying steem not the authors. Also, taking a cut from the witnesses is not a good idea.
This might be hard to hear for some people but the blockchain can survive without authors but not without investors (steem power holders) or whithout witnesses (without them there is no blockchain).
Besides authors would still receive a big chunk of the inflation so think about this.
Creators would only receive any chunk of inflation if they actually receive rewards. Some proposals extant would cut author rewards by 2/3. What do you think this would do to Steem? Retention is already below 10%. Cutting most of the rewards authors might generate would not improve this.
I think you are not recognizing that creators of content are the only source of value for Steem. No content, no reason to invest, no reason to curate, nada. Zip. Steem could not exist absent content, and decreasing author rewards will decrease further account generation and retention.
I agree that content generation has it's value via the attraction of more people to the network. However social media apps built on top of the chain serve mostly as fancy faucets for content creators.
The Steem blockchain can be much more than blogging and social apps (steemmonsters is an example that comes to mind). I just think that giving more than 50% of the inflation to the group that least contributes to creating direct demand for the coin is not sustainable in the long run. To me around 40% would be a good number.
The current 75/25 distribution between authors and curators is mis-aligned. The later group takes all the risk of locking up their investment and should receive a higher portion of the reward pool.
Most current users are not aware that it used to be 50/50. The proposal from blocktrades would leave the distribution of the reward pool at around 64/36. Overall authors would receive 46% of the total inflation instead of the 55%-56% that they get today.
I think a hybrid system may be the way to go especially as stated, the donations may not always be sufficient. It was also mentioned that there will always be people who will not willingly donate, leaving others to constantly shoulder the entire burden.
I will go with first one
A proposal system that only recieves funds via donations would be a good system.
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STOPDonations are good, but then everyone will expect big stake holders to make the most donations and there will certainly be unnecessary discussions about who handled fair, which donation is fair, who did not donate, who did it, why one did not and so on...
i think it is the best way to subtract it from the author rewards of every post and also from the witnesses depending on their rankings.
What about stakeholders that don't make posts or comment? Should they just ride on the coattails of creators and witnesses? What about decreasing the ability of witnesses to secure the blockchain, or decreasing their incentive to do so? Why base the contributions of witnesses on their rankings rather than their stake?
If we don't get some donations at the get go, I don't think we'll be able to start funding things soon enough, so some donations are probably necessary. Even so, I do think you're right that donations alone won't meet our needs in the long run, or even the foreseeable future. However, what we fund through tax, and what we fund through donation - which will always be possible, no matter if we tax or not - will matter alot.
How we choose what to develop, and how much to fund that development, is almost a larger question than how we generate the funds.
I'm going with this ^^
I am definitely in favour of using existing inflation.
Donations will be unreliable. There might be donations to begin with but eventually people will stop. They will lose interest or feel its unfair that donating falls on just a few people.
Taking from authors is the best approach. Witnesses only receive 10% of the inflation and struggling to cover costs as it is. The 15% interest is needed as passive income for investors. Curation rewards are incredibly low compared to author rewards. The current distribution of author rewards is greatly flawed, just look at: https://usesteem.com/steemwhales/topauthors.
I suggest we take 15% from author's for the proposal and another 15% from the author's to give to the curators. See table below.
If we are going to hardfork to adjust rewards, we might as well fix the curation rewards problem at the same time.
why the fuck always authors suffer from it ? they pay money to get some reward if there is free money in steem then ok but 99% upvotes for author are paid they will start loosing money and leave steemit forever
One of the reasons people choose to sell votes or delegate to bots is because curation rewards are low. If curation rewards could be competitive with vote selling, more people would curate content. A few other changes would need to be made to increase the effectiveness of this approach. Such as downvote pools and inclusion of sbd in curation rewards. I have written about such changes several times.
Natural curation would also enable the more popular content to gain exposure, which will be good for the platform.
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Curation rewards go up, bots benefit more from indiscriminate vote selling. Another important reason people delegate to bots is because of the passive income they can get by being absent.
So, this could mean a lot of things. More people might even begin voting indiscriminately on posts, acting as bots themselves. More people will powerup to get more curation rewards, increasing the price of steem. A great idea, but it's worth exploring and weighing the pros and cons.
I don't think this will be the case. Many users delegate to bots because returns are so much higher than alternatives. Raising curation rewards gives users a better alternative to earn from holding stake. I would expect, if curation rewards are raised sufficiently, users to undelegate from bots and more actively curate. Bots earn curation rewards, curation rewards are based on stake. Less delegation will result in less rewards for bots.
I still maintain that it might not be the case. Bots offer a way for inactive accounts to earn pretty decent curation rewards. More active users might undelegate and start curating manually, but there will still be a large group of people who will stick to the bots, especially now that curation became even more beneficial.
Higher curation rewards will also mean higher rewards to dapps. Inactive accounts can choose to delegate to dapps instead of bots. If dapps are also earning revenue from advertising, delegators can get a share of that as well. If curation rewards remain low dapps will struggle to compete with bots.
Again, I strongly disagree with simply incentivizing profiteering from curation more than we already do.
Please consider other values than money alone, and make a more nuanced proposal, since all that providing greater curation rewards, and decreasing author rewards, will do is focus rewards more on extant stake, while reducing the incentive to produce content. You must be aware of the issues regarding retention of accounts, and decreasing author rewards will exacerbate the problem.
Why not just eliminate curation rewards completely? People already vote on other platforms without any direct curation rewards.
Of course, on those platforms they can't cast votes that provide rewards either, so there's no incentive to selfvote, which curation rewards do decrease incentive to do. However, no matter how high you set curation rewards the incentive to self vote, circle jerk, and etc., won't be eliminated, unless you so decrease author rewards that there will be no incentive to produce content to curate.
There are other values that need to be rewarded via curation, and just changing how much money curation generates won't solve the problems that currently plague curation. Gaining trending or hot status are examples of nonfinancial rewards. There are others too. Please accord other societal values some weight in considering how best to incentivize curation, so we aren't simply furthering the idea of mining steem as opposed to creating a society.
Edit: also, this completely fails to apply any tax on accounts that don't post or comment. There are accounts that only flag, for example. Why give them more power financially than folks creating content and curating? Taxing everyone else will increase the financial power of accounts that only flag, only curate, or do neither.
See this comment, https://steemit.com/blocktrades/@spectrumecons/re-valued-customer-re-spectrumecons-re-whatsup-re-blocktrades-pros-and-cons-of-two-versions-of-steem-proposal-system-20190209t063647531z
Please see my (thoroughly edited - I hope!) reply there.
Thanks!
Take some funding from few percentage% of the Witnesses rewards
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