Now that we all learned that the developer fund will slowly be released for funding on the DAO, its time to start thinking about how we will utilize that fund.
There have been a few proposals that have been presented by @therealwolf and @netuoso already, which i cannot say i am comfortable with.
They both asked for 10% of the current daily budget for a year. If HBD stays at around 1$ that would mean they are asking for around 100k USD yearly which i find excessive.
While i do appreciate their efforts during these times and think guys like Netuoso deserve to be a top 10 witness, it is extremely hard for me, as a layman to determine the value of the "continuous development" he will be doing. And i dont think im alone in that.
My fear is that guys like him that were essential in our efforts for decentralization might get support more based on them being in the forefront of the talks then on the contribution they will be making as developers, "continuously".
Therefor I would like to see more proposals of the singular contribution variety preferably by a group of devs.
SMTs will cost X amount, they will take X amount of days and these 10 devs will complete them.
Spreading money around for "continuous development" seems inefficient and potentially wasteful. Even more so when the investors or the community might not have the technical expertise to determine how valuable some contribution is.
There is this huge trust aspect involved in proposals like that and i dislike that greatly no matter my opinion on how trustworthy or hardworking someone might or might not be.
Theres also the fact that the community is so driven, hyped and ecstatic right now that they would probably support anything without much question.
I know this will fall on deaf ears in times like this (no one likes a "party-pooper") but it would be great if its possible for investors to just stand back a bit and wait for some price discovery to happen for HIVE and look to support more organized efforts that will lead to CONCRETE singular task completion like SMTs or other.
MARKETING
If there is one thing many, if not all of us, had a big problem with during the Steemit.inc years is the lack of marketing and promotion efforts.
We had this big and driven community that wasnt utilized at all by Steemit.inc nor was it organized enough towards any promotion effort. (few short term exceptions aside)
Now that we have access to a fair amount of funds its time to start thinking about marketing more. You have 2 developers asking for around 200k USD (the price will be volatile so it could go either way) for "continuous development".
Based on that... How much should we be setting aside for marketing?
I am a user that will continue our efforts to spread the word on Twitter about HIVE, as will many others, but that might not be enough now that everything is settling down a bit and we move back into our blockchain to engage with each other.
We should start discussing marketing. Do we set aside 100-200k USD worth of HBD to pay marketing agencies in crypto of which there are many:
Crowdcreate.
ICOBox.
Priority Token.
WeRaise.
Byzantium.
Element Group.
Coinzilla.
Or do we do support community members, or groups with one-of tasks in mind?
Its important to start looking for answers to these questions.
Conclusion:
Now that the community is in control its time to assess all these options and not rush into anything driven by emotion and our recent victories.
We have a big responsibility now and our actions will determine if we succeed or fail.
Lets be smart about it.
Ill see ya. ;)
Well said. Development is important, but HPS proposals should be for specific deliverables.
Marketing is also important and has been much neglected. We have got great marketing from Justin Sun's idiocy, but this won't last forever.
There needs to be a plan for marketing long term.
Very good points, we need to fund the infrastructure though, the bigger the usage gets, the more expensive the API nodes get. Steemit Inc. was spending 30-50K every month just for running the website and API nodes after their drastic cost-cutting program, excluding cost for staff (another 100-200K per month, I guess, minimum). Marketing is also paramount. We need professional marketing besides our community effort.
Funding the infrastructure is a thing i have not mentioned in the post. Thanks for bringing it up. That is something those running API nodes should bring up to discuss.
You are exactly right.
Way too nebulous a description. $100k per year is a shitload of money by any standards. That's a good salary for an experienced full-time software developer. The proposals should include clear specifications and timetables. The community deserves to know exactly what it will pay $100k for.
Also, it's a disingenious to say that witnesses get paid below minimum hourly wage. The block reward is 0.246 SP. Consensus witnesses get paid about three times that per minute (a backup witness takes every 21. turn) signing a block. The total block rewards per hour is 20x60x0.246 SP = 295 SP/h. A consensus witness gets 1/21 of that, which is 14 SP per hour. At 19 cents, that works out to $2.67 per hour or about $23,400 per year.
Sounds low, certainly below minimum wage? Obviously not because a witness server runs mostly by itself and normally does not require 40 hours of work per week to keep it running! It does cost a few hundred a month to run a witness server.
I think witnesses can be expected to some development as well. The middle class of Steem was mobilized to keep the chain independent. Our vote is collectively very important and we should keep the witnesses accountable. The same goes for the SPS. Results or out. The relatively large rewards are nobody's piggy bank.
Agreed.
Thanks for this info - I was curious how much witnesses made to generate blocks. I think that making that much for relatively low investment of time and energy is going to influence decisions. I like the platform and the decentralized element but I think that this wealth needs to be distributed more to regular users who want to create content!
Well, content rewards make up 65% of the pot. 10% go to witnesses, which is fine because their role is crucial and we don't want incompetent and easily bribed people occupying their position. 15% go to Hive Power holders. 10% goes to the Hive Proposal System.
Half of the content rewards are for content creators, which means that 47.5% of the rewards on this platform do not have to depend on the stake a user has at all. The roughly a half do only makes sense because you want to give HP holders a reason to keep their coins staked.
The EIP implemented last September struck a pretty good balance between stakeholders' and content creators' interests. There are many powerful curation projects and individual curators on the platform who are happy not to sell their votes and curate for free. The system really by and large works now.
10% of the entire reward pool going to 20 people is quite a lot, which means that the coveted spot of being a consensus witness must be earned. Thanks to Steemit, Inc wasting a lot of money in 2017 and 2018 in particular instead of accumulating a sizable war chest, STEEM was dumped hard in late 2018 and 2019, which resulted in a much more decentralized stake distribution than before. Thanks to it, the middle class has enough power to be able to heavily influence witness voting.
Most witnesses should be competent and productive developers particularly during crypto bull markets when the price of HIVE can go obscenely high. Paying someone $500,000 (when HIVE is $4) a year for running a couple of servers just won't do. It is not just Steemit, Inc that dumped a shitload of coins in 2018. Witnesses did it, too. At $500,000 a year, a Hive witness who develops a front end could pay a professional UX designer if that is not their own core competence, for example.
I agree. Seems like people always want to get paid as much as possible up-front. I haven't seen anything done around here that should be valued 100k/year. I'd like to see (as some claim to be developers in real life), the hourly wage they get for it, it would be fun !
In real life, you need to prove you're capable of doing said work and bear the responsibility before being paid accordingly, not the other way around.
People will say "but you just un-vote the proposal and funding stops", but that doesn't work like that (hence asking for a full year in advance). Same for witnesses, thinking DPoS is a true "real-time" democracy when most votes were casted a long time ago or during the recent crisis (and all votes obtained during this JS/Steem crisis must be named what they are really : votes for decentralization, not votes for particular witnesses, it would have been easy to remove them all while forking).
HPS is based on the same principle as is witness voting : on a flawed "DPoS" stake-based system.
Remember that they were all talking about how our governance system was bad allowing one entity to take control. Justin stopped all SPS funding on the Steem blockchain, and now they want to get paid any other way.
The community forked and said that the first order of business must be to fix the DPoS governance problem. Let's fix that, instead of going milking-business as usual, just on another chain.
I cant say i agree with everything you said here but you make some solid points.
I try to focus more on the issues that the proposal system has trying to keep the DPOS issues separate in this case. (Like the witness votes issued long ago, you mentioned)
Well said. There is a lot of hope in the goodwill of those that put up proposals. There is probably something to be said about the lack of knowledge on how the DAO works.
Maybe a bit of sensitization might go a long way in helping less technical individuals to make informed decisions.
Goodwill of those that make the proposal still remains the risk factor which is why i think we should focus away from "continual development" towards "task completion".
Blockchain is meant to be trustless but the DAO doesn't exactly represent that. Being paid after task completion is probably the way to go which leaves the question, how do you go about coding that logic into the DAO?
I saw both of those proposals and had a hard time wrapping my head around the actual cost (in USD) that it would be. If your numbers are even slightly accurate then yeah 100k a year seems excessive.
At 1HDB - 1USD hes asking for 99 000 USD a year.
My issue isnt the money, per se. Developers might be payed that much and working in crypto is risky.
The issue is the trust aspect and what he calls "continuous development".
I absolutely get it. Also if the price of HBD goes over the 'one dollar USD peg' then that amount could be much greater.
I like the distinction between a set amount and continuous development.
Marketing was "decentralised" on Steem and while the community spammed a lot of shitposts on Twitter, not a lot of them were effective. Like 80% of people tweeting sound like bots going "Steem is the best". I'd like to see something concerted and elaborate; like an actual campaign that will run on traditional social networks, showcasing the whole point of building and being in Hive community.
Exactly. Thats why an organized effort is needed with a professionaly planned process being funded by the proposal system.
The most important thing is to have a way to hold the people being paid accountable.
$100K a year for a dev is reasonable otherwise.
The big issue is trust here.
You have to trust them to produce work that a 100k a year dev would. You have to trust them to "come to work everyday". Those that they would answer to, the investors and the community might not have the technical expertise to evaluate their work.
Thats why im leaning towards singular task completion funding.
You know what will be done, you know how much it will cost, how long it will take.
Yeah I prefer project/task based quoting. Especially since there is a lot of learning involved etc so just because people quote 30hours if they know what they need to know it would be less.
I also think there needs to be more separation of concerns when it comes to community work, ie the servers etc need to be their own thing and it needs to be mentioned how dependant they are on a specific stack. This allows budget cuts or superfluous requirements to be dropped.
Like you Said, I think trust and accountability is key here I believe it was something that flawed steem Inc,
Exactly... Thats why i think we should move away from that, first of all through our behavior and approach, then via code.
jarvi from peakd wrote when SPS started that small proposals are not efficient, because you need more campaigning for it to pass then to finish it. they had few small ones and then just made a all in one. now different thing is that you can see their work, work on the blockchain code is in most cases not that obvious.
But i do agree that some kind of rode maps and time frames would be good. again asking for reports is a bit tricky as the time spend to make them.
I am maybe not the right person to comment on that, because 100K or even 50K is mostly a science fiction in our parts of the wood, so...
I wouldnt consider SMTs a small proposal.
Exactly because the dev work isnt obvious is why im saying: Lets not vote for "continual development" but rather task completion.
Continual development is vague and doesnt necessarily lead to any organized effort in creating large or worthwhile additions to the network.
Should conditions change can the proposal be unvoted by the community and thus force the dev to submit it at a lower rate? I imagine in general it will need to frequently be rebalanced.
What can happen in theory i dont think will happen in practice.
Not so sure, if there's scarcity in the dev fund and popular proposals can't get funding... Especially if the overfunded proposal is underperforming. It's definitely something to pay attention to.
How much will be available and how many and what kind of proposals will be available is the question.
My point is to move away from these "continual development" proposals towards task completion proposals.
I would definitely weigh more heavily towards definitive tasks and milestones.