We’ve been working on the Steem Proposal System for almost a week now, so I thought it would be a good time to provide an update on the progress.
Steem Proposal System (SPS) changed to Steem.DAO
First, on the marketing front, the name is being changed to Steem.DAO (DAO = Decentralized Autonomous Organization) per the request of Steemit Inc. DAO is a popular term for blockchain-based systems like the worker proposal system.
For the cryptocurrency history buffs among us (mind you, it's a pretty short history), the most famous such DAO was the rather ill-fated “DAO coin” on the Ethereum network, which failed due to bugs in its implementation (so we’ll try hard to avoid that in our design). Personally, I believe the term DAO was a takeoff on the term “DAC” (Decentralized Autonomous Corporation) created by Steem’s own @stan.
Progress so far
We’ve create a github repository forked from the Steem code base where we’ll be doing the work:
https://github.com/blocktradesdevs/steem/issues
We’ve reviewed the implementation of the worker proposal system in BitShares and identified the key differences for Steem. We’ve also spec’d out the basic sub-tasks required to complete the project (see the issues link above) and discussed the algorithms we will use. Our next step is to begin actual coding of the system.
Decision on the use of a funding source based on inflation being deferred
The poll on whether to use an inflationary funding source has been a bit inconclusive so far, and with the available polling tools, I think it will be difficult to reach a solid conclusion on what source to use, even if inflation is the consensus approach to long term funding.
Therefore, I’m coming to the conclusion that the best thing to do is design the initial system as a pure donation system, then allow proposals to be made within the Steem.DAO itself to decide how to add future funding sources to the DAO’s budget.
This has a couple of benefits over existing polling solutions: 1) any user can dynamically add their own competing idea for a funding source by creating a proposal for it and 2) the Steem DAO uses "approval voting", so users can vote on multiple competing alternatives that they like, with the aggregate voting results ranked by stake-weighting, and 3) voters have a way to vote for how many funding sources they want to have, by moving the “refund proposal” up or down the proposal rankings.
One potential problem with the above idea could be that there wouldn’t be enough funds from donations to fund the proposals to add new funding sources, but I’m assuming Steemit’s initial donation should easily cover any such costs.
Existing accounts on the Steem blockchain that are used for various things such as @null are created with a locked state preventing anyone from ever using it.
In this case, @blocktrades created the @steem.dao account and will be able to manipulate the account in whichever way they deem fit. Even if the keys were nulled out, there would be at least a 30 day period where an account recovery could be executed to change the owner key to another one @blocktrades controls.
How will you make sure we don't just have to take your word on the security of the funds sent to @steem.dao or any account?
https://steemd.com/@steem.dao
https://steemd.com/@null
The hard fork should lock the state of the account. Presumably they only registered it to prevent someone from registering pre hardfork (when it is not special) and pretending they are official
▀
I was thinking about another feature for the DAO. What if Steemit, Inc or any other busy witness, have a good idea they want to code but have other priorities at the moment.
Can they propose the idea, allowing a random dev on Steem to do it and giving him the rewards instead?
Yes, it's possible, but that involves the proposing party calculating the cost, rather than having the cost set by the party doing the work, so that's more of an example of a bounty-based usage, and it also means that the party doing the work would need to rely on the proposing party to pay them from the funds received (but that could be done fairly safely, especially if the agreement is to pay them on a recurring basis throughout the proposal's lifetime).
Sounds good.
I'd think that the early homerun hitters would be generous with contributions to what they need to expand demand.
They, after all, profit the most by continued development.
Sounds good. I think donations won't be enough over a longer time period, but I guess having stake weighted voting via the DAO for a possible inflation model will solve that problem.
Good job!
It seems you also have decided that only inflation is an acceptable way to source funds.
Would you please point out what other sources you have considered? Have you considered not changing from the current funding source, that has been providing funding since Steem was created?
Just list any sources besides inflation that you're aware of, so that we can eliminate those that aren't better than this new tax on inflation and not fail to undertake any that are. Pretending there aren't other sources is disingenuous, as well as likely to miss better mechanisms.
Like the tried and true, perhaps. Without fair consideration and understanding of alternatives, we run the risk of being herded into bad decisions that might harm the community but profit some predators.
You wouldn't want that to happen, surely.
I hope so. I don't see donations being plentiful or diverse enough in the long term to be able to cover the costs of the various development needs. I think that this is a suitable compromise however and I do think that pretty early on, the need for alternate funding will be recognised.
That's how I view it also. The main reason for the deferral is to have available a tool suitable for getting a good consensus on what those funding sources should be.
After some consideration, I reckon multiple mechanisms for providing funding would best meet our needs, as we have a diverse community, and those folks will prefer various means of kicking in.
Given that development has been undertaken by a couple different means so far, and those means remain available, funding via the DAO might preferentially provide mechanisms not presently available.
For example, extracting fund for development from existing inflation is being done right now, today, via posts that support projects being upvoted. Other mechanisms exist which also draw from existing inflation. Direct funding of development via spending individual stake is also presently being done.
You haven't discussed other mechanisms than those currently in place as mechanisms the DAO will potentiate, to my knowledge.
I reckon brainstorming some funding mechanisms would really inform the process of potentiating those mechanisms the community is willing to implement.
Maybe you could post asking for such ideas, as the party implementing the DAO.
Makes sense to me. What do you think?
Fair enought for a start
I think had we had the inflation come from more than one source instead of all of it coming from the author reward pool, I think we might have had better consensus among the community. That route would also have the least dramatic impact on any one category...
What about sources other than inflation, such as has funded development since the blockchain began? Beginning to fund development via inflation has not been done for Steem, although other development has, but strictly on a voluntary basis.
A new drain on inflation may not be the best way to proceed.
I agree with others on here that most other sources won't be adequate, won't be enough. However, if we pulled inflation from all 5 categories it would have the least amount of overall effect on everyone.
this update on funding is a much welcomed one.
there was growing concern in some corners with some of the ideas being floated as putting the funding burden on only one sector.
Why move towards a less intuitive name? We already are up to our eyeballs in non intuitive nomenclature on steem. Time to reverse the trend. Let's make this an easier less weird or difficult place ... another example is the term "witness" is just so offputting I promise it makes us look like a bunch of freaks. Dao may be fun blockchain speech but we shouldn't learn how to work with the masses from blockchain projects.
Personally, I tend to agree, and I hate the name "witness" (in fact, I was just discussing recently with other witnesses how bad the name is, and problems that have resulted from that choice for the name of block producers).
Generally, I prefer descriptive names and I also dislike acronyms precisely because I think they are not very descriptive. But it's not my decision to make, and I can understand that the use of the term DAO might appeal to one of the primary demographics for investment in Steem (existing cryptocurrency holders).
But I also think that Steem is one of the few coins that has a lot of appeal outside that market, so there's a better argument with Steem for choosing a descriptive name over one that "sells the best" to crypto people.
Yeah DAO may not be my biggest worry it's just kind of the straw that broke the camels back. It's just such a worrying and ongoing trend that steem development has not thought of end users and supposedly just thinks of developers or crypto people (not like developers woudn't also understand intuitive terminology as well) ... add to it that crypto people don't know what the heck they're doing either. They can't get substantial usage of their supposedly genius apps among hundreds of blockchains so I worry about appealing to them because they're doing something wrong and I think it's in part the way they communicate.
In any case we'll work around things ... i'm guessing there will be an open sort of way to interface with this proposal system? If so SteemPeak will try to add it in as a tool and hopefully it seems intuitive to users regardless of the non-intuitive name.
Yes, there'll be a relatively simple API for getting a list of the proposals, vote counts, etc and allow voting.
The UI will be under your control, of course, but if you've got a UI for witness voting, you can probably start with that one.
As far far as the name goes, I'd recommend adding a short paragraph on your UI that describes what it's about.
Good start !!
Pilot with donations , once we understand the working system better make informed decisions afterwards.
Seems like the first rational approach to the topic! I’m a firm believer on getting something done rather than debating ifs and buts all the time! Iteration is the only way to progress to a suitable solution
Posted using Partiko iOS
You ever heard someone say 'do something, even if it's wrong.'? I have, and I avoid folks like that in my industry, because they cost me a lot of money.
Here's something I like to keep in mind: if you don't take the time to do it right, you'll make the time to do it over.
I work in construction, where things get cast in stone. Doing it wrong costs more than three times as much as doing it right, because you first pay to do it wrong. Then you have to pay to undo the wrong you did. Then you have to pay to do it right, finally. Then there's the additional loss of time and money not having the right thing done costs you by delaying other things that depend on it.
That's if you're lucky, and you don't have to fix it again. You don't have to lose money too many times that way before you learn to think as long as necessary before acting.
We don't want this to end up costing us money. We're doing this to make Steem more valuable.
I agree with your sentiments and I can imagine in construction it can be a problem! I work in tech and I’ve built plenty of sites and applications for startups to large scale corporates and in my experience it’s better to move fast and break things
Since tech can scale easily the money you waste on time debating a solution can be far more than selecting a poor implementation you create a system you test the load you get data and you refine! Tech is fluid it’s nimble and can be adapted as long as you start doing and iterating, you only find the best solution through data and user interaction
I’m not saying it’s the only approach to things it’s just one I’ve personally use and advocate and I’ve had a lot of success with it
Posted using Partiko iOS
While tech as an industry is fast and nimble, it is through evolution that this is expressed. In other words, those individual companies that fail and break die, and the rest of the industry continues along without those failures.
Individual companies that can quickly recover from failures that break them can be fast and nimble. Steem requires a consensus of witnesses to implement code after that code has been developed, and that is after learning what code should be developed. All that takes time, and is not fast and nimble.
We need to carefully NOT implement code that will break Steem, as it will take months to recover if we do break Steem. Steem is not fast and nimble in that sense, and the DAO will make it far less nimble that one stakeholder being able to decide what it wrong and fixing it has been. Just grasping as a community that there is a problem, and then deciding what to do about that problem, will take more time than Stinc took to fix the RC problem that came from HF20, for example.
Steem development has only been funded through direct spending of the stake of a single stakeholder to this day. The DAO is intended to enable us to fund development, and spending the stake of Stinc to do that is no longer going to be the only means of doing so.
Speculating that reducing spending on marketing to increase spending on development - which is what drawing from inflation will do - without negative consequences to marketing, is foolish, and I am confident it will harm Steem.
Let's give this a lot of thought before casting it in code that will take months to undo if it's done wrong.
So even doing that as fast and nimble as you tell... you're in the tech a minimal plan is needed for avoid to lose money. That's mentality is the mentality created by Microsoft on Bill Gates time. Nowaday even them planning for long term before announce a product.
How about starting with a low level of inflation being moved? It’s already designed the right way and seems like to pass and be effective
How about we start with witness rewards from the top 20? Or would that seem premature with further consideration, as well as detrimental to you personally?
How about we consider other sources besides the rewards pool which provides incentive to benefit Steem? After all, inflation hasn't been used to fund development before, so why should we suddenly change the extant funding mechanism for one never tried without considering alternatives?
Why don't we pull inflation from multiple sources?
Why don't we consider other sources than rewards? Consider: rewards are incentives for effecting benefits for Steem, things that tend to increase it's value. Why diminish them?
Development has not drawn from inflation to date. Instead Stinc has directly funded development by spending it's stake. This discussion of using inflation/rewards to fund development is NEW. That is not how development has been funded so far, at least not by those developing Steem itself.
Using rewards to fund development is not necessary. Rewards are critically important to create value of Steem. Consider that other sources besides rewards have always been the source of funding for development, and may remain the best options today.
To be clear: I have no real doubt that one or more sources of inflation will be used for funding.
But with available tools, it's hard to tell which sources the community wants to use, and in what proportion.
I don't want to be the one making the "final decision", which is what would have to happen with the available polling methods. Once the Steem.DAO is operational, it will make the decisions automatically, based on the votes.
How do we avoid manipulation by large whales? We already see some whales and large stakeholders display actions that benefit them at the detriment of the overall ecosystem
thats how it works, the more stake you have the more to say you have
Stake weighted voting has both pros and cons.
I reckon such will inevitably be attempted. There will be observable consequences to those initiatives. If decidedly negative consequences result, the markets will react accordingly.
Fools all too often do themselves harm. Fortunately, not all in the Steem community are fools, and folks intent on increasing their stakes will be extremely likely to oppose foolishness with diligence.
We have a fragile user base. Retention is awful now. If it gets worse because of profiteering, users will vanish, and Steem value will collapse. Lessons will be learned, hopefully before existential and terminal consequences eventuate.
The right proposals being funded, effected by appropriate personnel, and producing growth and gains in Steem value are the purpose of this initiative. If growth and gains are inadequate, or worse, stakeholders are going to act to intervene quickly - or lose their stakes.
That's what we got. Let's make sure we use what we got well.
Thanks!
All of the profiteering and wrecking of perception has happened big time year over year @valued-customer, but I am not here to whine about that, it's done and over with. We can learn from it or keep sticking the fork in the light socket and see what happens next or find some very truly revolutionary ideas that bring competitive advantage to a highly dynamic platform in comparison to so much else you see on the coinmarketcap top 100. I would go as far as re-vesting voting shares (somewhat/somehow) to allow for fresher voices to intermingle with those that have heavy stakes and encourage those that may not even be here yet and those that have been ignored during the wholesale departure due to prior failed planning.
While we can't go back in time and not do things that were done, none of the things done are cast in stone. As we gain better grasp of the issues and dynamics of Steem, we can do things that best grow it's value, including changing or undoing things that were done in the past.
I do advocate changing some things, but the changes I advocate are not supported by the folks whose profiteering drain on growth those changes would reduce. Odd that. Anyway, there is tension between investors, who seek to grow the value of the investment vehicle, Steem, and produce capital gains, and profiteers, who seek to extract value from the investment vehicle, Steem, and hoard it in their own accounts.
Since Steem wasn't founded by seasoned investors, but cryptokiddies, the investment cadre isn't particularly robust. Either profiteers will learn by their mistakes, or they will keep making them, and Steem will not increase in value as a result of sound investment improvements if they remain dominant.
Time will tell.
This story was recommended by Steeve to its users and upvoted by one or more of them.
Check @steeveapp to learn more about Steeve, an AI-powered Steem interface.
Congratulations @blocktrades!
Your post was mentioned in the Steem Hit Parade in the following category:
Great news! Music to my ears this Valentine's morning. I will spread the good word. Thanks for this post @blocktrades and all you do for our community leadership. Resteeming!
wow usefull ur post.
That sounds like a reasonable first step to me
Posted using Partiko Android
Good start @Blocktrades. Thanks for the update. On funding, let's just keep our eyes on the project development as it goes, where need arises for alternative funding users would be notified. We have to make this as open as it is because it a project for the entire #steem blockchain.
Wonderful to hear that the system itself will then be used for the funding source votes!
Is @steem.dao the official account that funds will flow through? Just curious because I’d be ready to start donating some funds, setting a small beneficiary %, etc. right now if that’s viable.
Yes, @steem.dao is the official account we will use for it. We got it now to "reserve" the name.
Bridge is down on the BitShares DEX
It's fixed now.
Counting on donation to advance steem development is not predictable. If we all benefit from the blockchain why not use the inflation to fund development. Who will be donating? I think this strategy is a road to no where.
Have you considered all the possible mechanisms besides inflation? What about all the possible effects of the various mechanisms, or even only those involving inflation? You ask 'who will be donating?'
Those things need to be considered, and then we can undertake them.
Acting without forethought seldom ends well.
If you don't know where to go, not going yet is exactly the right thing to do.
@blocktrades, what I don't understand is why we can't have the latent features in place to simply turn on via a consensus flag later on in order to enable inflation funding from existing sources with % parameters that are decided at the time. I mean the vote was for either funding only model or funding + inflation sources and either would be paid for by Steemit, in this post you are saying that you will do the simpler funding only method and if inflation is added then the DAO has to pay more later. IMO it makes more business sense to have all features built-in now ready to be activated later.
Donations and inflation aren't the only methods that were discussed prior to the poll, or thereafter. Further consideration of various possibilities and potential beneficial and harmful effects of many different mechanisms bears doing.
This is probably a major reason the poll was 'inconclusive'.
We just haven't thought of all the possible ways that things could be funded, or how many different ways we will fund them. How can we code them all if we haven't realized they are potential yet? Further, we surely won't undertake all of them, so why spend the money to code in things we will never do?
You seem to have decided what to do already, so you're ready to hardcode your decision in.
The community needs to explore a lot more before we all make our decisions. Only after the community decides will coding methods of funding become reasonable to undertake and prevent wasted time, effort, and money.
At this point it’s on Steemit’s dime as I understand it, so no harm in building in inflation funding features, doing it later will cost the community. It is highly probable inflation sources will be used after donation funding.
Also makes for a good emergency funding feature incase donations deplete or never come to fruition. At least there is a backup funding method available to be activated upon consensus.
On what do you base this assessment? I have discussed how inflation funding - which has not been done before for this purpose - will definitely harm Steem value, and the community.
You haven't yet mentioned those harmful consequences.
Please do give them consideration.
Funding for developing projects other than Steem itself, through posts and upvotes, which is completely voluntary and doesn't require a DAO, has also long been undertaken, and continues to this day.
Why not simply adopt that mechanism for Steem?
There are a lot of assumptions that are being passed over in comment on this issue, and this is preventing debate, which limits perception of options, and thus the solutions available to be implemented. I don't find this to be an optimal course of action when seeking to create optimal solutions.
'On Steemit's dime' means Steemit is directly spending it's stake, right? Why is this being changed? Why is this being spun as if it was impossible to simply add more large stakeholders contributing from their 'dimes'?
Funding has been done by directly spending Steem on it so far. The use of author rewards taken without being voluntarily contributed is both a new proposal, and one I show will have very harmful consequences to the value of Steem, by harming content creators.
It's basically offshoring development expense to marketing, and this is not a good time to further decrease marketing efforts, as the bear market is already doing that. Development is a core functionality of investing, as is marketing.
I do not recommend cannibalizing marketing to unload development costs from whales. Growing the market for Steem is what will create higher value for Steem, and rational investors want that to happen.
Profiteers only want to extract benefits while paying as little for them as possible. That will not increase the value of Steem.
We don't want to fund profiteering. We want to fund investment.
@valued-customer, are you affiliated to the Blocktrades company? My comment was directed at Dan @blocktrades for consideration, so not sure if you represent his/the company views or just your own. Ned has just responded and thinks this is a good idea to prevent further hardfork costs and there is further discussion in the Steem devs slack which Dan will be privy to.
Any other funding methods are likely to be tiny in comparison to a % of inflation funding, consider even @smooth's @burnpost project would not bring in nearly enough for such funding. @blocktrades himself also mentioned donation funding alone would pale in comparison to what Bitshares currently has in terms of emission funding. Should donations run dry there needs to be a backup plan that can be executed easily, dried up funds for WP = even more embarassing on a public scale.
Steemit is happy to pay for latent features to avoid further hardfork costs and will save the community and other stakeholders money in the future if extra features are built in at the start to be activated later via proposal consensus.
On what do you base this assumption?
I will point out again that funding via inflation is currently ongoing for other development than Steem itself. What additional extraction method besides voluntary upvotes (inflation) and donations (direct spending by stakeholders) do you expect will provide benefits without detriment, and why do you insist only on the former as a reasonable source?
I have asked @blocktrades to crowd source funding mechanisms, as the only mechanisms so far discussed are those already operating. If we're going to implement a novel mechanism to fund development, we'd be wise to have more than the assumption that extracting more funding from marketing to spend on development won't hurt.
It will. That is the only funding source that has been proposed by any substantial stakeholder, and I reckon the reason is that the extant funding source of Steem development is direct payment by substantial stakeholder (Stinc), and whales don't want to share in those costs.
You haven't addressed these issues yet, merely reiterating your support for decreasing the incentive to create content that is the marketing for Steem to a large degree, and supporting that position with an appeal to authority.
Please do.
You haven't addressed my question as to whether you represent blocktrades or if these views are your own?
"...other funding methods are likely to be tiny in comparison to a % of inflation funding..." - I base this on the @burnpost community initiative which could be a method of funding, but the revenue it brings won't be enough.
You are assuming I want to decrease the incentive to create content, my first preference would be to take from the interest pool, which is not well advertised to external investors and only resident stakeholders even know about it, and because the wallet doesn't even show an APR for it I myself don't even notice the benefits and forget I am receiving that, imo interest is of no benefit unless it is clear that users are receiving it, so I would rather use that inflation source than that of content creators, if there is pushback then the most equitable would be to reduce all inflation sources equally, but that is not for me to decide but rather a community consensus issue, just clarifying that your assumption of my preferences is incorrect.
Kindly clarify your association with Blocktrades, that is pertinent info to me.
If there are no donations it would mean there is no interest, if there is no interest, maybe... it will not be done... ?
I understand your point of view as a CEO of a team of developers but we need to start at some point thinking in the consequences of our actions on the ecosystem.
We should not Tax content creators it will hurt the ecosystem, most new users not buying bidbots votes are rarely making above 1 $ in rewards and this goes in detriment of the user base as they migrate back to traditional social or move to clone chains with promises of more Fairness the less users we have, the less buzz about steem, the lower the price and the worse for everyone of us.
I think we all should go and read the original White Paper
First it hasn't been updated in ages and second we have strayed away from it, we are at a point we it doesn't resembles to the promise in that document.
This also makes sense in terms of avoiding the costs of a second hard fork process.
Nice, thanks for supporting my suggestion @ned.
wtf is going on with steem and steemit accounts on twitter ?
they are not working.
When we go through ICO and SMT process ?
Taking it slow is the wise choice. We don't want a steem civil war.
So when a system made an inflation its create its own money. When the money is created by itself without anything that give directly sensi for that, indeed that system will be destroyed in itself. And certally will be lost your own value. So inflation could be the must easy way to start but indeed in a short term the system will be fail and fall. The consistent way is the reducing authors rewards and put votes and donations also, from my point of view, this to better way. No pain no gain. There no free lunch.
Great to see the decision to move towards a DAO/DAC like structure as it would be a leading factor to foster decentralization in every sense of the proposal. Exciting to see this come together although I cannot begin to understand the technical considerations behind it.
Posted using Partiko iOS
This post has been included in the latest edition of SoS Daily News - a digest of all you need to know about the State of Steem.
If you only go with "voluntary donations" you might as well do nothing. Thats what all this will amount to.
STEEM is suffering partially because of pure, unrelenting greed so please dont think relying on donations will yield any results because it wont. Initially Steemit.inc might donate some.
This most definetly isnt worth 150k Steem from Steemit.inc if donations remain as the funding option.
The author reward cut is important because it will create other positive side effects along with providing funds for the betterment of the platform.
Thats the course of action we should take and let stake holders based on stake make the call.
I think there's almost zero chance we'll end up with just voluntary donations.
The only reason we're starting with voluntary donations is because we didn't have a good system in place for deciding what other sources to use until we had the Steem.DAO in operation.
From the polling results, it became clear that there wasn't a large enough consensus to make a decision via a simple poll in such a way that wouldn't leave a lot of people feeling cheated by an unfair decision-making process.
Steem frontends can add in a obligatory stake based vote on this decision with a 1 week timer. Cant log in without voting on the proposal. You can fork in a obligatory referendum type decision making process for major changes with the DAO youre doing.
Think of something....
Leaving it on people to donate part of their funds is a very rosy way of seeing the world. Though i do appear rosy, my outlook is very mid-range.
Glad to hear donations arent the expected end game.
It's not so much a problem of getting people to vote (I think it's fine if people don't have enough opinion that they don't want to vote on the issue, in such a case I don't think they have much reason to complain if the result isn't to their liking).
I'm more concerned about people that DO want to vote, but end up unhappy because they are concerned that the poll choices were created in such a way as to tilt the decision in favor of one option over another, which is pretty easy to do unless you have some kind of "approval based" poll where you can vote on multiple options, and where the allowed options are "open" to be proposed as options by anyone willing to pay a reasonable fee to make it an option.
This is always an issue. There is no way around it which is why i always emphasize going back to stake. There is no 1 option over the other, there is only what the majority stake wants.
I have been following the Steem Alliance (to avoid confusion, it has nothing to do with this.) thing for a few weeks now and once ive seen a individual with something like 500 SP speaking as an authority and over Ned, Fyrst, Aggroed in the voice chat, i quit the Steem Alliance discord immediately and never looked back.
My point is that there will always be those that will be unhappy, loud, etc... but we can always look to stake when making these tough calls.
Thats your basis for any poll you might make.
Great choices so far good luck with the work.
I am glad to hear that, if there are not enough funds from donations it might mean that there is no general interest in having it done.
The alternative was the equivalent to taxing at the source authors to pay for development of the money making machine, when authors as is barely see any interest since the introduction of bidbots to the STEEM equation.
Maybe one day big and small stake holders will realize that with no users, no content and with no content no value on our beloved blockchain.
I like this
I like this