Amazing post.
To avoid the rich, get richer, the stakeholders vote on network nodes instead of just sitting back and collecting the network fees.
What happens when the rich are the ones running the nodes? e.g. blocktrades, gtg, themarkymark, therealwolf etc...
Not criticizing anyone, I love them all, but we have to realize that witnesses on hive have massive stake, and seem to be only ones able to earn from the DAO easily, as they have a good track record.
Once the price of hive goes higher so that witness rewards are large enough, we should have a rule banning witnesses from submitting proposals to the DAO. This will help avoid the rich get richer problem.
Although anonymous witnesses could always create two accounts and game the system.
For instance, without having onchain communication, we would be vulnerable to being silenced, siloed, and overall fragmented.
If an attack on the network is successful and we need to organize to hardfork, the attacker can easily shut down communication and censor users, as he can hardfork every 2 minutes with dummy witnesses.
So even though hive is censorship resistant, it won't be when successfully attacked. Am I missing something here?
Not to point anyone witness out, but since you mentioned Him, therealwolf has powered down most of their stake and is not considered a large stakeholder anymore, yet is still in consensus. I'll name one more (there are several) - Luke Stokes, who was a consensus witness for years and was not a whale.
Sure, you'll have whales that become consensus witnesses, which comes hand in hand with being a hardcore hiver and the means to back up what you believe. Large staked users have the most to lose as well; thus is more highly desirable to be in consensus due to trust in one's self interest to be upheld. The diff between elected vs. non-elected systems is that non-elected whales can sit back and soak up supply, where I can name several large whales who are not in consensus and never have been (myself included). Thus we have not been sitting back collected inflation due to solely our stake. In elected systems, in theory, the ones getting inflation are those you want to get it. In elected systems, you're only as strong as your network of "good" voters; we need as many good Hivers with as much HP as possible, evenly spread, of course.
While nothing is perfect, elected systems do run into the issue of set it and forget it, meaning you find a group of great nodes; nature dictates that you're either getting better or worse. Thus these nodes overall have gotten better in terms of more stake, more time on their reputations, and a better understanding of the network. So in a sense, the most reputable in elected systems get richer, and to offset this, we have PoB inflation distribution, which I believe has been the backbone of our network effect.
On Hive, for instance, we can see a money attack coming with the 1-month powerup. We hard forked rather quickly vs. Steem, and that involved a lot more changes due to wanting to get Steem out of the code name. If we were to fork again, we would likely just keep tAhe name Hive (sue us, lol) and leave out the attacker's balance. So as you saw, when Justin finally got control over the network, by that time, Hive was up, and we could communicate over there. There is no way to "instantly" take over Hive, and we would have plenty of time to set up shop elsewhere minus the attacker's coins. A
Very good point forgot about that one. Although someone who really wants to attack hive could create many accounts and power up less 1 million hive in each account. No one could see the attack coming if he powers up at a random frequency in many accounts during months.
Then he could suddenly censor key community leaders from the chain and communications would still disappear on chain. The good thing is that it's impossible to block communication between a community offline, it will never be too hard to talk outside of hive.
We could hardfork even without on chain communication imo, or with limited on chain communication. So that's not such a big problem.
I completely agree with that and I welcome it. Although it means that it is possible we fall in the rich get richer problem, if those people start making bad decisions. They have a good track record for now and definitely don't seem greedy.
They put hive before their own interests, or at least it appears that way to me.
The ultimate solution to the rich get richer is forking whales out, or forking to a new blockchain where concerning whales get only half the coins they did before. Forking solves everything.
Hopefully the threat alone will always keep whales in check.
I don't see a point tbh. If the proposal directly benefits the community, and if it demands a lot of work I wouldn't exclude to vote for compensation.
As you said, in this case anyone can game the system.
I like to think that witnesses have to maintain their integrity, whereby demanding a compensation for 6 lines of code would be their political suicide :)
And being top witness when hive hits 20$ will be quite lucrative deal.
Can't we just run the old code? I doubt anyone could censor everything before the community reacts. That's the main strength of DPoS and Hive.
Yeah, maybe there's no point in that. However, I would definitely prefer voting for witnesses that use the witness income not just to run nodes, but also contribute to hive in other ways. Obviously at this price it's not possible.
No, because an attacker with majority stake will just vote 20 dummy witnesses and run whatever codes he wants to run.
We'll have to hard fork without being able to use hive (if the attacker censors people on hive).
That's not a huge problem though, people can still talk over many places on the internet and reorganize.