Lot's of people are talking about changing the rules of the powerdown once again. Lot's of talk about 4 weeks vs 13 weeks. Lot's of talk about allowing funds to be powered down instantly but being charged a fee to do so.
Why though?
Presumably, all this talk about lowering the powerdown period is to increase the token price and make Hive more hospitable to investors. Right? Because people on the platform wouldn't have biased opinions and just want things because they want them, yeah? Yeah everyone around here wants the best for everyone. Crisis averted.
Once again I'd like to point out that this topic is not at all appropriate for discussion at this time or within this context. No one should ever think that a gigantic jump from 13 weeks to 4 weeks is a good idea. That's fishtailing. We're automatically signaling to the world that we have paper hands and a system that is totally unstable and should change on a dime. That alone right there is enough to deter investors.
So many reasons.
Another reason why an instant powerdown with a fee is totally inappropriate is that it makes OWNER key security COMPLETELY WORTHLESS. If my active key gets stolen and there is a way for hackers to use the active key to instant powerdown my funds... then what the fuck is the point of the owner key to get my account back when my entire stack just got drained?
Opting out with custom time-lock smart-contracts.
Now, the obvious solution to this problem is a way to opt-out. If you want to make suggestions about how Hive should change the rules, you better also be thinking about ways to opt-out of that rule change. It seems like literally no one is doing this, so it's very hard to take these suggestions seriously. There's a reason why the people who are actually in charge of these decisions (IE the core developers) are not talking about this stuff. I'm glad the mob isn't in charge, that's for damn sure.
If we want to change anything regarding how funds are locked, then the absolute first thing we need is custom time-locks so anyone can lock their funds in any way they see fit. That way if implement the whole instant powerdown with a burn anyone who wants to opt out of that option would be able to. I personally want absolutely nothing to do instant powerdowns. I like my current time-locks right where they are.
This topic is grossly overplayed.
The price of Hive isn't going to be affected by these changes. There are so many other things we can do that will moon the price way more. First and foremost is fixing the stable coin HBD. If we actually had CDP smart contracts and the ability to mint HBD out of thin air the price of Hive would go at least x10.
I've also detailed how easy it would be to go in the opposite direction. Instead of minting HBD from the CDP loan, we could mint Hive itself from the CDP. Are you tired of never having any liquid Hive when the price pumps? No fucking problem: JUST MINT MORE and go short on Hive, dump your loan on the market and hope the price crashes after a pump just like it always does. We could be the first network ever to have a decentralized futures market and no one is talking about it. That's an x100 right there.
The solution is simple: enhance governance votes.
Wouldn't it be nice if the network could just vote on this shit instead of constantly posting about wild changes to the system? Wouldn't it be nice if the changes were slow and controlled rather than volatile and ridiculous? It's not hard.
It's not hard
I've already made the diamond-handed solutions available:
Power cooldowns are kinda cool because you get the first powerdown instantly instead of having to wait a week. Of course, in order to prevent exploits and allow this to happen, it would take 1 week for your vote power to go up after powering up. So we have to ask ourselves: what's more valuable? Having a bigger vote the second we power up, or being able to powerdown the first week instantly? I think the ability to powerdown instantly is pretty cool, but once again we don't have to force everyone on the network to do it the way we would do it. We can make it an option to pick either way. Accounts would be flagged with a binary option: does this account opt-in to power-cooldowns, or do they want to stick with the traditional way?
Tug-of-war governance voting is the real solution. Every month or so there would be a vote using HivePower. If the vote passed the powerdown period would be lowered or raised 1 week. That way the number isn't flailing wildly and it actually decided directly by the stakeholders. Adding governance votes to Hive makes Hive more valuable. Users will want more Hive when they realize they can make more decisions other than just voting for witnesses.
When would these changes even occur?
That's another thing no one seems to talk about. They sure as shit can't happen in the next hardfork 25. So many things are changing in HF25 and yet we are still talking about even more drastic changes to the system? Why? Again, totally inappropriate to talk about this stuff at the moment. We need to wait for the MASSIVE CHANGES that will occur next hardfork and then refactor from there.
Again, we're changing FOUR major consensus rules very soon. The convergent curve will be gone. Competitive curation will be gone. HBD will be capped at $1.05 up to the haircut level. The yield of HBD in the savings accounts will be greatly increased. So many changes, yet we need to talk about even more before the next hardfork is even in place? No. We really don't.
Conclusion
Plain & simple, to everyone that talks about changing the powerdown schedules: if you haven't considered ways to opt out of your new system, if you haven't considered how instant powerdowns destroy owner key security, if you haven't considered that maybe this change won't have a positive effect on the price... well it's pretty hard to take that suggestion seriously. Sorry, not sorry.
The solution to the long powerdown period is to implement DeFi on Hive via the savings accounts. The savings accounts are only locked for 3 days... and we could EASILY lower that to like 1 day if we wanted to (again, even better with custom user-defined time-locks).
There is no reason to dick around with the blogging reward pool rules. This mega-bull run has shown us that DeFi is the answer. That means high-yield AMM farms and a kickass algorithmic stable coin. I am literally in the process of doing all of this myself with my own token.
It's surprisingly simple:
- DeFi high-yield farming
- AMM trading
- Algorithmic stable coin that dirives value from overcollateralization in CDP contracts.
- Fully functioning futures market with collateralized debt positions (able to mint both the stable-coin or the governance token on demand).
- Adjustable inflation rates and cannibalistic token sinks.
- NFTs
Gonna get back to it so I can get this thing into the wild and show what a superior system it is in practice rather than in theory. I've already got the LP pools up and running an AMM trading seems to be working.
The real solution to all these problems is "democracy". We should vote on them... with stake. That's the entire point of DPOS consensus.