As I’ve watched events unfold in the last week or so in the Steem community, I’ve become convinced that we urgently need a worker proposal system like the one that exists in BitShares, both to speed up and to decentralize the development of the Steem blockchain.
Yesterday, our team took a hard look at what it would take to implement a similar system in Steem (with some improvements based on our experience with the BitShares implementation), and we believe we can deliver a fully tested worker proposal system in 1-2 months at a cost of between $50K-$100K USD (this wide range on completion cost may seem strange to someone who hasn’t been actively involved in software development, but estimating the time to complete a software project is extremely difficult in most cases).
Last night I contacted @ned to see if Steemit would be interested in funding the proposal and he liked the idea, so we decided the next step to get a conversation going would be to write this post to describe our team’s initial idea for how the worker proposal system would work. I’m also planning to attend the Steem alliance meeting on the 27th to have a live discussion of the potential benefits of a worker proposal system.
What is a worker proposal system?
A worker proposal system allows Steem users to publicly propose work that they are willing to do in exchange for pay. Steem users can then vote on these proposals in almost the same way they vote for witnesses (stake weighted votes, but voters can vote for as many proposals as they want). The proposals that get a sufficient amount of vote weight get funded from a special Steem account controlled by the blockchain. For the purposes of this post, I’ll refer to this as the “funding account”.
Disclaimer: this is just a rough spec
A worker proposal system represents a reasonably complex system, both from an economic point of view and from a detailed implementation in code. In this post, I’m skipping some details involved in the actual implementation to keep this post as readable as possible for anyone who has a general interest in how such a system would function.
Who pays for worker proposals (how do funds get into the funding account)?
One of the most potentially controversial aspects of a worker proposal system is “Where does the money come from to pay for worker proposals?”.
Our proposal is to add a small amount of inflation to Steem (e.g. 1% annually) that is paid into the funding account. This ensures long term funding for the blockchain and it also allows for that funding to grow as the blockchain itself becomes more valuable. If we assume that Steem’s market cap remained constant over a year’s period at its current value of $121 million, that would mean 1.2 million SBD would be generated over that period to potentially pay worker proposals.
In addition, anyone can make donations to the funding account and Ned has indicated that Steemit would likely be interested in making such a donation.
[EDIT: After having to make this clarification in at least half a dozen comments, I want to point out that 1% was an e.g. (an example amount of inflation) rather than an actual proposed amount. Also, I am personally completely fine with those funds coming from the reward pool versus a new source of inflation. I'm somewhat neutral on the source and I expect there will be many opinions on what that source should be. That said, feel free to express your opinion as to where the funds should come thru in the comments below, but please let's not forget to think about the rest of the system as well.]
As a side note for any economists reading this post: more properly, I’m talking about increasing the supply of SBD in the same way that new SBD is created to pay for posts, instead of “real” inflation, which refers to the value of a currency relative to physical goods. In Steem-related posts, the term “inflation” is used so often to refer to this creation process that I decided to stick with it for this post. Just be aware that it’s not valid to compare this meaning of inflation to its common meaning with regard to a fiat currency like the US dollar or the Euro.
Worker proposals paid in SBD rather than Steem
Instead of paying workers in Steem, I strongly believe it’s better to pay them in SBD. In practice, SBD maintains a much more stable value versus Steem with regard to external goods (e.g. food). This allows a worker to have a more predictable income from their work and it also makes it easier for stakeholders to evaluate the worth of the funds being asked for.
A large part of my belief that paying worker proposal in SBD will be better than paying in Steem is based on lessons learned from BitShares. In BitShares, the worker proposal system in its “natural state” paid out in units of BTS instead of in one of it’s more stable currencies like BitUSD and BitCNY. This almost always led to one of two problems: 1) if BTS dropped too much in value, the worker was no longer getting paid enough to do their work or 2) if BTS went up too much in value, the worker was getting paid too much for their work, leaving stakeholders unhappy with the deal.
To resolve this problem in BitShares, a third party organization was ultimately set up that collects funds in BTS, but instead pays out BitUSD instead, and most worker proposals on BitShares nowadays operate under the oversight of that organization. But this adds a bunch of overhead and requires trust in a 3rd party organziation to properly handle the funds, so I think it’s much better to design the Steem WPS to natively pay in a more stable currency.
What does a worker proposal look like?
A worker proposal is created by submitting a transaction to the blockchain (a process similar to writing a post or voting) that has the following information:
- account_being_funded (generally this will be an account owned by the person or group creating the proposal, but not always)
- daily_pay (the amount of SBD that is being requested to be paid out daily)
- start_date (when the proposal will begin paying out if it gets enough vote weight)
- end_date (when the proposal expires and can no longer pay out)
- subject (a very brief description or title for the proposal)
- url (a link to a page describing the work proposal in depth, generally this will probably be to a Steem post).
Worker proposal fee
To avoid frivolous proposals that waste the time of stakeholders, we are suggesting that a fee of 10 SBD is required to create a worker proposal. This fee will pay into the funding account.
Capping daily expenditures to ensure proposals get properly vetted
To prevent someone with a high stake from voting in a proposal that drains the funding account before other voters have a chance to vote in favor of other proposals, we’re also proposing a daily budget limit on how much of the funds in the funding account can be spent in a given day. The proposed formula is as follows:
daily_budget_limit = funds_in_funding_account/100 + daily_worker_inflation
Taking a look at the Worker Proposal System in action
Let’s consider an example where we have multiple competing worker proposals:
A) Blockchain Curation Worker: wants 300 SBD per day for 14 days to improve the curation code
B) Marketing worker: wants 100 SBD per day for a year to run ads for Steem on a cryptocurrency site
C) Refund worker: represents stakeholders who don’t want to spend funds on any proposal with less stake weight than the refund worker. It wants 100,000,000 SBD that will “refund” the SBD back to the funding account (effectively, any funds this worker receives don’t get spent but are instead held in reserve in the funding account for possible use in the future).
- Assume funding_account starts with 1000 SBD
- assume daily_inflation = 350 SBD
- daily_budget = 1000/100 + 350 = 10 + 350 = 360
Sorting the active proposals by highest voting weight, if the order is A, B, C, then A would receive it’s entire requested budget (300 SBD), B would only get 60 of the 100 it requested (because only 360 was available in the daily_budget and A gets paid before B starts to get paid). No funds are left for C, so none of the funds for the day are kept in the funding account.
On the other hand, if C (the refund worker) got the highest vote, all the funds for the day would go back to the funding account and neither A or B would get paid that day. The funding account would end the day at 1350 SBD. And the next day’s daily_budget would be 1350/100 + 350 = 363.5 SBD.
Alternatively, if stakeholders want to fund A, but not B, then they would vote for a stakeweighted ordering of A, C (refund worker), B. In this case, A would get 300 SBD, and the rest of the daily_budget would be recycled back to the funding account, B would receive no funding, and the funding account would have 1050 SBD at the end of the day (assuming no new funding was added via a donation).
Don’t like inflation being used to pay for worker proposals? Vote in a “burn” worker
If stakeholders at some point decide they don’t like inflation being used to fund worker proposals, they can create and vote in a “burn” worker that pays a roughly equivalent amount of SBD back to the “null” account. SBD transferred to the “null” account is effectively destroyed since no one can access it.
GUI wallets will need to support the worker proposal system
BlockTrades is proposing to do the blockchain level work for this system and to make the required changes to the command-line wallet, but GUI wallets (e.g. steemit.com) will also need to implement a voting page for proposals similar to the page where users vote for witnesses. This is necessary to give all stakeholders a way to vote for their preferred proposals as soon as the worker proposal system becomes active. Because the process of voting for a worker proposal is very similar to voting for a witness, this shouldn’t be a difficult task.
@blocktrades kudos to you for really stepping up over the last few months to contribute to the development of the Steem blockchain (and for all of your past contributions as well, of course).
I feel like we are at a turning point for Steem right now and what we as a community do, in addition to Steemit, Inc, will determine whether Steem will ultimately succeed and grow exponentially or slowly die off.
I really, really hope that Steemit, Inc steps up and funds the development of this system and then also makes a very significant donation to the funding account and I will do what I can to push them in that direction.
I'll simply +1 this!
While off-chain solutions (such as foundations) are also an important asset, we absolutely need on-chain worker proposals. Now, I'm not in favour of increasing the reward-pool, but rather redistributing some of the 75% for posting rewards to it (for example 75% to 65%).
And regarding the implementation, the price sounds reasonable. Would be 125k - 250k at the current 40c STEEM price.
I'd take from the curators if from anyone, the content producers long term are going to be what matters. We can see this issue already with Youtube, all the content producers are complaining about the company taking too large of a share and content producers not being profitable enough. Long term, I don't think the average user will value their curation reward all that much, because most content consumers will not have much SP anyway.
But 10% is way too high, the 1% makes more sense. 10% is huge and a danger to decentralization long term, while 1% is not something I would worry about.
I agree with you. I think taking from existing inflation is better than creating more inflation. I would push for a little higher than 10%. Maybe around 20%, pushing posting rewards to 55%. Witness and interest payments shouldn't be reduced.
Gauging from responses in this post. Using existing inflation appears to be the preferred option.
Donations would be great but they are less of a guarantee. Beneficiary rewards are another way of adding to the fund. An initiative similar to what @steem-plus are doing could help.
Yes! love this! keep it decentralized I also understand that this would ensure the steem token would not be able to be classed as a security by the SEC since we will have a community distribution mechanism instead of a centralized group of people deciding where the money goes.
It's really hard to say what the SEC will deem a security and what it won't, but I think the biggest issue for Steem w/r/t being a security is Steemit, Inc's large, privately-controlled stake, which this system won't change or resolve at all. Even with this mechanism, Steemit, Inc could use their stake to decide where the money goes. The fact that they choose not to doesn't change the fact that they could.
Absolutely, and I appreciate that this solution does not fix the steemit inc stake problem easily, however the same proposal system could be used to autonomously delegate steem to projects from steemit inc's stake. This would ensure a decentralised decision process as well as allow the steemit inc stake to be distributed / diluted over time, while making it difficult for authorities to demonstrate that there is a central group of people treating the coin as a security. So as long as Steemit inc put some process in place to show that they don't or can't decide where the money goes, and that there is a wider community decision where an autonomous system, that they / no central party controls, I am sure (but not certain) that it would be difficult, (maybe impossible) to prove that steemit inc or anyone is treating steem as a security
As long as their stake is not vested it doesnt get counted in the voting?
Only sp votes.
I'm all for this, my only concern is the issuance of additional SBD's. What happens when we hit a cap of 10%? Does it stop paying in SBD. The more SBD's we have in existence creates a lot of risk if the price of steem tanks to under 20c or 10c, because then a ton of steem has to be created if people trade up to steem, which they will do because they get a good price, which decreases the steem value for all the stakeholders.
This is a good question for @blocktrades to answer as this is their proposal, however in the event that the price of STEEM drops such that the debt to equity ratio falls below 10% again, then SBD will no longer be convertible to $1 worth of STEEM. So the same mechanisms that are in place to prevent the debt from going over 10% will still apply and function.
If SBD is still being printed in this new scenario, then that will just mean that projects get less funding in fiat terms than they asked for (which is bad but unavoidable) and that it will take a larger increase in the market price of STEEM to get back under 10% since new SBD will continue to be printed.
In my opinion, this is ok, and as discussed in the post if it becomes a problem, the STEEM Power holders can vote to burn the SBD instead of use it to fund projects if they feel that this is better for the overall platform.
That all sounds fine, but I'm not a big fan of SBD going below $1 to fund all the extra printing. Non crypto outsiders that I talk to, look at the price not being pegged as another reason to not invest in Steem because it's not working properly.
I think it should be possible to vote proposals that fund in either STEEM or SBD. For example:> If stakeholders at some point decide they don’t like inflation being used to fund worker proposals, they can create and vote in a “burn” worker that pays a roughly equivalent amount of SBD back to the “null” accountIn the circumstance when SBD is overvalued and in short supply it would be preferable to burn STEEM rather than SBD and in some cases vice-versa (although less important since the latter can already be addressed with conversions). There may or may not be other circumstances (apart from burn) when funding STEEM is acceptable or preferable. Possible examples: 1) advertising spend which can be easily ramped up and down in fiat terms, 2) a fund which can accumulates up to some desired balance, and the rate of accumulation isn't that important. 3) donations, prizes or other sorts of promotions where the fiat value doesn't matter much.This proposal depends on SBD functioning well, so it should take care to help contribute to the successful functioning of SBD rather than potentially add further strains on it (e.g. burning SBD when it is overvalued).EDIT: I have withdrawn the above comments after reading @yabamatt's reply which points out that proposal can simply be written which sells SBD then burns the STEEM (or can even do this conditionally based on the SBD price), much like my @burnpost project. Given that observation, the added complexity of selectable payouts isn't needed.
On the matter of inflation, I am totally against increasing inflation under almost any circumstances i.e. when not absolutely necessary. I do not believe it is absolutely necessary in this case. Such workers can easily be funded out of the existing reward pool, especially if they are only 1%. This amounts to reducing the reward pool from about 5% to 4% currently, which is hardly a catastrophic decrease (given how poorly the existing reward mechanism works, I'd be happy to reallocate even more to something that works better, but that's another discussion). It also could be feasible, I believe, for worker proposals to be voted that send funds back to the content reward pool, if that is what voters think is their best use (somewhat complicated perhaps by the fact that the existing pool doesn't have an allocated "system account" name like @null, although probably it wouldn't be all that hard to add one).
The reward pool has always (going back to the white paper) intended to reward contributions which add value to Steem, and the existing 7-day content-item voting method is only one way of doing so, not the only one (and not one that is even working all that well). Such worker proposals would amount to adding another method of awarding the same fund for the same (broader) purpose.
Reallocating rather than increasing inflation, apart from long term investor credibility issues, is as a practical matter by far preferable to adding even more supply and selling pressure into the market which has already struggled to maintain a non-declining price for Steem.
One last thing. I understand the historical context of Bitshares workers but I would strongly suggest to rename this to something like a funding or treasury or budget system. "Workers" is somewhat confusing and less compelling of a message to anyone who doesn't come from Bitshares, since the mechanism can fund actual workers but can also fund other things that aren't workers at all (including as you mentioned burn).
I would also prefer to reduce the reward pool to fund worker proposals rather than increase the overall inflation rate. I definitely like the idea of paying out in SBD rather than STEEM though for the reasons described in the post.
Regarding a situation where SBD is overvalued and in short supply, I assume in that case we can just not vote for the "burn" worker proposal, and vote in another proposal that instead will sell the SBD on the market for STEEM (assuming there aren't other proposals to do actual work that we want to fund).
Good point. The latter could be some worker version of @burnpost. I will edit my comment to note this.
Does reducing the reward pool include reducing payments to witnesses?
I would be in favor of reducing witness rewards proportionally with any other reward decreases, but keep in mind that the witness rewards are pretty small in the scheme of things.
Even if witness rewards were not decreased, I would likely donate funds on a regular basis to the pool and I'm guessing many of the other top witnesses and projects on the Steem platform would do the same.
I'm against reducing the witness rewards. They've already been massively reduced in HF16 and are making up only 10% of the total rewards in the pool.
However, with that said, I don't mind supporting some projects on a project to project basis (e.g. the 150+ STEEM bounty for the multi-sig implementation).
There's 2-3 witnesses in the top 20 that I haven't seen do anything meaningful in the last 1.5 years since I've been here. At least I haven't seen them do anything. I don't think it's fair to be taking the money away from stakeholders instead. By increasing the inflation rate, you are diluting the price of steem, which decreases the money of stakeholders.
The job of witnesses is to: a) faithfully sign blocks (not to sign blocks which would serve to impair the good functioning of the chain); and b) exercise good judgement in the interests of the blockchain and its stakeholders to vote to activate hard forks and set witness parameters (block size, APR, account fee, etc.). As far as I know all top 20 have been doing this. One could certainly question judgment in some cases, but that is pretty subjective.
Perhaps by "do anything meaningful" you are expecting witnesses to go beyond the above and provide some sort of bread and circuses, but that is not the job of witnesses, nor should it be. To the extent that witness elections devolve into a contest over who can do the most or spend the most, it destroys the security margin of the blockchain.
As a stakeholder I will vote against witnesses I see doing this. Likewise, I recommend that stakeholders focus their witness voting on evaluating the suitability and performance of witness candidates in performing the critical and irreplaceable functions described in the first paragraph of this comment.
I fully recognize that many stakeholders do not understand this and will vote otherwise, (most likely) unintentionally undermining blockchain. This makes me not all that optimistic about DPoS unfortunately, but wishing it were not so will not make it not so.
To bring the topic back to this post, I'm told that the very reason Bitshares implemented worker tasks was to ensure a clear division between witnesses (who do the essential witness tasks, see above) and workers (who "do" all sorts of things, as defined by worker proposals). (Bitshares breaks down the role even further into witnesses and committee but that's a discussion for another day.)
what about producing blocks?
not meaningful enough?
Posted using Partiko Android
As a witness in the 90+ region I can tell you that I am burning money every month. My server cost me about 180 a month and I make 4-5 Steem a day.
Witness rewards are already likely on a trajectory to be much too small in Steem unfortunately. The way the system was set up, total inflation declines and witness rewards remain a fixed percentage of the total. So in the end state (18-ish years from now), witness rewards will be 0.09% which is a tiny security budget by the standards of most cryptocurrencies (excluding the ones with fixed supply but there continues to be more and more skepticism about that model working, for example see recent BIS Bitcoin paper).
For now, trimming off a bit of the roughly 0.85% witness rewards might be okay but as you said they're still pretty small in the scheme of things (and this is true both an absolute and percentage terms). I would not support a long term reduction in witness rewards though, as I think long term they are already on a path that is too low.
What about witness rewards being paid in SBD instead? The witnesses would prob like it under these conditions, but would be against it if steem ever went to $8+ again.
I don't think a fixed witness pay makes sense.
Part of witness pay (arguably the bulk of it) is for faithfully serving and securing the chain. If you have (hypothetically) $10 billion chain and witnesses being paid say $30K/year, that is a recipe for disaster not only in terms of scaling costs but also security. It may be fine when the value is only $100 million. But as the amounts of value at stake scales up, witnesses can easily be corrupted by outside influences worth more than their $30K/year position, but with significant negative costs for the success of the chain. You really want witnesses to be very well paid if the chain is worth a lot, ideally with more to lose from losing their witness position than to gain by acting against the interests of the chain/stakeholders.
I think a reasonable percentage per year makes sense, something likely in the 0.5% to 1% range, although the exact numbers may be up for debate in the future when we have more understanding of blockchains being used and critical to a rich, mature, economy.
i would also be interested (as said in my main reply) that post_rewards might automatically fund this worker fund :)
Maybe there would be a way to cohesively integrate witness rewards into the proposal and steem rewards economy. Witness rewards were always an incentive to for the infrastructure donation that witness have to make just to be witnesses on the blockchain. Maybe those rewards could serve more than one purpose that can be used to offset inflation.
It could possibly address the stale voting issue of witness votes by replacing the top X witness system with rewarding witnesses through funding appropriations instead. Without getting too specific, witnesses would be rewarded through successful projects that they fund through steemit appropriations. This would basically turn witnesses into angels. The more projects you lead to success, the better witness you are, and the more you will be rewarded.
I actually meant the opposite. Keep witness rewards out of the mix. As long as it is a small change I think most will be ok with it. I would suggest a 5-to-4 move is to big. Something like 5-to-4.75 would be a decrease in rewards by 5% and seems not drastic in either direction.
As I noted in a child reply here I would suggest against doing that (at least long term) but I would still prefer it to increasing inflation.
YES!
!ned
Enjoy your ned and don't forget to recommend nedcore!
up until now, if anyone says nedcore to me, I 'd expect to hear hard style music in few seconds...
For the reasons previously discussed in my post, I'd prefer to keep worker proposals paid in SBD, but it would only moderately increase the complexity of the system to support both. In such a case, the simplest implementation would be to have a separate pool of funds for SBD proposals and Steem proposals, with SBD proposals competing for SBD and Steem proposals competing for the Steem. A more complicated system would allow for some automated conversion between the two coins and all the proposals would compete with each other, regardless of the coin they were denominated in. In general, I prefer the simplest possible initial implementation without Steem proposals and leave it open to later improvements if it seems warranted.
I do agree with your concern about SBD price pumping causing potential problems, but I'd prefer to see implementation of the Steem->SBD conversion solution previously discussed as a method of stabilizing the price of SBD relative to USD.
I'm actually pretty neutral on where the source of the automated funding comes from. I suppose as written in appears that I'm favoring adding a new source of "inflation", but I'm actually completely comfortable with it coming in part, or in full, from one of the existing sources of inflation and I've been operating on the assumption that different people would propose reallocations from different existing sources as well.
On the naming issue, I would be fine changing the name. For the initial discussion, I felt it best to keep in the terms used by BitShares, as this would allow the greatest clarity for the reasonable size community of Steem users who are familiar with how it works and for people who want to take a look at how the BitShares system currently operates. But for long-term external marketing, I don't have any strong preferences for how it is described and probably some A/B testing should be used.
As @yabamatt noted, the SBD pumping issue can be handled outside of the core mechanism anyway. Proposals can be made to sell the SBD instead of burning it. This requires a bit more trust than funding directly to @null but that is true of the entire mechanism. So I have withdrawn that suggestion.
Although this seems to be off the table and not needed, I don't think it would be very hard to: a) keep the fund in STEEM, b) make the optional conversion from STEEM to SBD at time of payout based on a property of the worker. I.e. the same way content rewards currently work. The refund worker would be required to be STEEM-denominated in this model.
Yep, ultimately I think that would end up describing my second "slightly more complicated option".
I tend to fully agree with you on the reward pool adjustment over inflation increase. Well put.
Instead of increasing inflation what about reducing the interest slightly that is paid to the vested Steem daily? Wouldn't that keep the pool the same size and then have the funding come directly from the staked users who will benefit from the development?
@swiftbot tip 100
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couldn't some of that stock split be reallocated though instead without changing the available reward pool at all? I am just thinking that (I agree reducing the reward pool is a better option than increasing) reducing rewards might become a point of contention with smaller users whereas using a small percentage of the 'stock split' means that it will be funded from already staked users, meaning the largest will effectively pay the most even though on the same percentage cut.
Not my area though obviously.
The bottom line is that shifting from vesting rewards to anywhere else increase inflation on Steem Power holders. On what some other commenter noted is already a high inflation system, this is not a good idea.
I'm actually not a huge fan of the whole vesting system and I'd like to see it scaled back (for example, power down being 7 days instead of 13 weeks). If vesting rewards are reduced (or eliminated) then to avoid increasing effective inflation that should just go away (reducing nominal inflation) rather than reallocating it (increasing effective inflation).
None of the other current uses of inflation have this property so they would be fair game to reallocate, from the perspective of not increasing effective inflation. Which should be reallocated is obviously a matter of debate, even if we agree on not increasing effective inflation on an already-high inflation coin.
Or as @blocktrades originally proposed in the post, inflation (effective and/or nominal) could indeed be increased, but I'm personally very much against this for both long term and short term reasons.
Thanks for taking the time.
Has there been any talk of decreasing the powerdown duration of 13 weeks? It should be 2 weeks tops, or at the most 4 weeks.
It has been discussed several times but there is no broad agreement on it. My own view is one week.
Maybe if you have some time I could walk you through what we’ve developed for eosDAC so far. We’re creating a worker proposal system managed by elected custodians and includes an escrow account, arbitrator per WP, and a review process to ensure work is paid only when there is agreement it was completed as speced.
I really do like the idea of using SBD, but I’d want to also fix the peg. Maybe create some automated way to convert in both directions for users who opt in (i.e. funnel some payouts, if configured per account, into a conversion either to or from SBD when someone claims their rewards to keep the peg working as it should).
I also echo comments here about using some of the rewards pool instead of further diluting investors with an increased rate of token creation via SBD. Have we found the sweet spot for posting and curration rewards to increase everyone’s value? Would taking some of that funding and put it toward projects help us all? Maybe.
All these details could get worked out, and we have a number of projects to look to for ideas (Dash, SnartCash, BitShares, etc). One thing we may need to figure out is the joint and several liability for the Steem community if someone sues people involved or some governments get upset about employment law stuff. We’ve spent months working through these complexities with our lawyers for eosDAC. Would be happy to chat about it sometime if you want.
Thanks for looking into this.
Getting the price of Steem past $1 shouldn't be to hard. I offered @ned to help raise the price of Steem to around $3. He never took me up on my offer. I will offer again once the Alliance is up and running.
What would your strategy be to get STEEM to $1 and $3?
I will offer up a proposal to the Alliance once they get up and running.
@lukestokes
The worker proposal contract is still being designed, but the idea is when a WP is submitted to the custodians for approval, it includes an EOS account name as the arbitrator. Custodians will factor that in to their decision to approve or not (is that person an expert in the subject matter, are they trusted by the community, etc). By default the arbitrator would just be the custodian board, but that gives them two seats and the two of three mutisig escrow contract. The point of the arbitrator is to ensure the DAC and service entity avoid legal drama if someone feels they should get paid as promised but a new custodian board is elected and refuses to pay.
Thank you for the reply. The arbitration role is very important and in bidding portals etc where escrow feature is currently used the release often ends up in disputes.
The governance and voting based on the Blockchain technology sounds like an important application of the technology. Ie as important as disruptive as the currency use case.
very good idea blocktrades! sure needs to have some additional thoughts but the basic idea is good and should be really really considered.
and i think as well that reducing the current reward pool makes more sense than increasing inflation.
Personally speaking, I also would be fine with the funds coming from the current reward pool or some other existing source of inflation. Where exactly to get that funding is probably going to be the biggest discussion point going forward, but I'm hoping that while that discussion goes on, we can still get agreement about other points about how the system would function.
Thank you team @blocktrades for this proposal including researching a draft with your team to actually create this.
I think it is a great step for the Steem blockchain to add a worker infrastructure. I'm quite a fan of the BTS worker structure because it enables people to work on all kinds of Steem related tasks and get paid through a more "stable" payment, provided their proposal gets enough votes, then having a one time writeup about it.
If it is not to much work, would it be possible to have this "funding of the fund" also added to the options to choose from post_rewards? Iaw: 100% of these post rewards automagically go to the Worker fund. Ofcourse one can always do that after payouts, but I think it would be good to have.
Having a "refund worker"-concept in place is essential I think, just to have some "virtual vetting bar" before projects receive funds. At least that's how the 400K-refund worker feels in BTS :)
+1 on using SBD.
Totally agree on the importance of the "refund worker" concept. It's critical for setting a voting threshold.
I like your idea for the post_rewards setting that pays to the funding account. It's pretty orthogonal to the worker proposal system itself, so it could easily be implemented afterwards (and the work could be "bid" on by competing parties via the worker proposal system itself).
I've been in favor for 6 months or so. Thanks for a proposal to actually build it. I wouldn't want to see new inflation, but I do think a haircut to rewards inflation to support code and market development would do wonders.
So far as I can tell, the consensus opinion of stakeholders who've spoken up so far to is put the haircut on rewards inflation, which I'm fine with personally.
But the actual percent would have to decrease over time @blocktrades @aggroed, since I am pretty sure that the inflation rate of Steem is supposed to decrease to 1% in 20 years, or something like that.
(I forgot the actual numbers)
We always say that the community is the strength of this blockchain - Implementing something that will help to strengthen and support influence from the community therefore seems pretty smart from my technical-noob perspective!
What happens if the majority of the Community don't want a proposal but a single heavy stakeholder upvotes it to the top of the list?
It appears to me that one must always lean towards the assumption that the greater the stake one has in the project then the greater the motivation to see the project succeed. This does not always mean that their path to success is the correct one; yet the concept of the whale boogy man seems of minimal concern to me.
A single heavy stakeholder can't upvote it to the top of the list against the wishes of other stakeholders unless that stakeholder has more stake than all other active stakeholders combined.
Based on witness voting statistics, the only possible stakeholder that could do this given the current distribution is Steemit Inc, and I'm not sure even they could do it if there was a truly concerted disagreement on the part of all other active voters.
Also, when I spoke to Ned, he assured me that Steemit would not vote on worker proposals and while Steemit could always renege on that, I think the resulting damage to trust would never make it worthwhile to do so.
but what if 3 big stakeholders make a deal or 5 of them? i know that 1 vote for 1 acc would not be fair for all the people that invested a lot but this also has a lot of space for abuse. as someone who's vote means nothing i wish you all the luck.
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The potential downside to such behavior is a reputational loss to the system which affects the value of their Steem holdings. In practice, I haven't seen this abuse vector happen in BitShares.
Looks great, thanks for all the work you've put into this so far.
What about the bounty proposal system? With it I refer to tasks that someone (coop, alliance, individuals,...) deem beneficial and are looking for workers to carry them out. Like a contract proposal...
Also, who / what decides that proposed work is completed and of adequate quality?
Yes for the funding source being the existing reward pool.
In the end, even with this system put in the action and working, we still need some common authority to oversee, direct, guide, govern,... it. And we are back to governance 😀
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Bounty proposals can easily exist outside such a system and doesn't require an on-chain solution. In BitShares, they use a process called "BSIPS", for example, as a way to develop ideas for tasks that the community would like to get done.
If it's code that requires a soft or hardfork, then the decision to use it is up to elected witnesses to decide if they will use the code or not. For other tasks, there's no real decision maker, it's just everyone's opinion. If the community feels the worker didn't really complete the task, they likely won't hire them for future work, and the worker will likely suffer a loss of reputation (and of course, the worker has the option to return some or all of the funds if they want to avoid some of the reputation loss).
I don't think there's any need for a single common authority. Such an authority doesn't exist in BitShares to my knowledge.
But just because it's not necessarily needed, there's nothing to prevent the creation of one or more companies that do oversee projects, if stakeholders consider it a reason to support or not support a proposal (3rd party oversight by an experienced manager/company/etc). I think @xeroc runs one such company for BitShares, although I don't know the extent of what his company does besides escrowing and handling payouts in bitusd rather than bts.
Thanks a lot for the thorough answer. I appreciate it that you take the time to answer such ramblings like mine. Good luck with your proposal. I will certainly support it.
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Hear, hear!!!
Will be awesome to have it happen but things have to be well thought out. Which I am sure will be the case. I am just not the one to understand some of the details.
For now, asking out of curiosity...
What about taxes on any such work payment?
What about varying daily work time schedule?
Can it vary and how much?
What spheres of work would be eligible? All of them since the beginning?
For a worker paying the taxes on his work, it's going to depend on where he resides. In the US, it would be treated as income, just like receiving fiat payments.
The worker proposal doesn't impose any limits on how/when someone works.
Worker proposals can be for any time of work. For example, someone could propose to run a charity.
Thanks for the reply! I am thinking of something and I would like to learn as much as possible.
I guess you meant Type instead of Time. Correct?
yes
A beautiful idea that gives a chance to active users and creative potential to be freed. I really believe that it can raise the whole system to a higher level, especially for developers.
I don't like the 1% inflation either, but seeing as how you edited a comment this largely addressed what I was going to say on the subject. I was thinking a x% tax/donation of all posts on steemit (not comments) could go to the fund, but no idea if this would be enough/discourage people from posting.
It would be nice if votes could be tallied in 2 ways with a % of weight put on both. # of votes and take weight of votes. It would still give investors a heavier vote, but allow minnows to gather together and come up with initiatives as well for those smaller voices on the platform. Not sure if this will even be doable, but just a thought.
Don't know how this would be accomplished either, but would prefer to pay people in terms of % project complete. For instance, if someone was requesting money to do advertising, maybe they would be paid a certain percentage after the ad video was reviewed and approved by the community, a certain percentage for a few months of advertising to see how well the video is working and then a certain percentage for the rest of the year advertising costs, and then full funds at the completion of the "work". Once again, a lot more complicated, but gives more security to the funds to confirm the work is being done and is paid on a more real world contractor type basis.
Showing the number of votes as well as the weight would be very easy.
To do the percentage completion idea you talked about, the worker could break his task down into multiple proposals with payouts for each stage/milestone.
I was referring to coming up with a way to weight voting not only by stake of weight of vote, but by # of votes. For instance if someone had a proposal that was voted on by a lot of minnows with no stake they could rank higher than someone who proposes something that gets 1 vote from a "whale". I could see how if you do it based solely on # of votes that could be gamed by creating a bunch of nothing accounts, but would like proposals to go through other than those voted on solely by 1 or 2 big whales.
Agreed it would be easy for the person proposing the idea to break it down. I was just assuming it would be harder to automate something like that instead of someone just coming up with an idea needing x sbd per day to implement y which could be automated more easily.
Ah, so you didn't just mean you wanted to "see" the number of votes, you want the number of votes to affect which proposals get funded. Unfortunately, this can't really be done because a single user can easily have as many accounts as they want to buy.
Indeed, because of the nature of the original mining process, many whales have dozens or more accounts. And some hackers have abused the faucet run by steem to create thousands of accounts. So using vote counts is pretty useless. To make it useful, the chain would need some way to verify "one person, one vote".
Very intriguing idea. I especially like your two pseudo accounts concepts with the refund and burn worker. It makes it feel both democratic and decentralized and ultimately fair while being adjustable.
It's too democratic for it's own sake, look at the history of BTS and how much progress they made over the years... It's good in theory, but hardly anybody here spent hours/days researching BTS worker proposals like me. Look at how hard it has been for BTS to even make a simple mobile app
You make a very good point. I'll have to think on that more.
Umm, maybe you haven't noticed that Steemit never came out with a mobile app after promising one for years?
How does the worker proposal system protect us from contracts that are not completed on time, or it does satisfy what we thought we were getting?
Also I do not understand how payment is defined. In $USD paid out daily by creating as much SBD as required, adding to the debt? There is no safety to reconsider payment form if SBD has a cataclysmic price drop?
I really like this idea of worker proposals. Just trying to understand how costly or risky it might be.
Workers are paid on a somewhat continuous basis, so if stakeholders are unhappy with their progress, they can unvote the proposal. It's very similar to paying someone on an hourly basis for work, then stopping future payments if you don't like the work they are doing. Naturally this requires either oversight of the work or else some trust in the people doing the work.
In the case of someone you don't trust at all because they are "new", you could have the funds go to an escrow entity, that would only pay out the funds based on delivery milestones. But it's often difficult to find anyone willing to work on such terms.
Payment would be in SBD, so the value of that payment would rely on the value of SBD itself. Another worker proposal I'd like to see proposed shortly after this system is in place would be a proposal to fix the peg for SBD as has been suggested in the past.
As far as the risk goes, the least risky method would be to redirect some SBD from the current reward pool to the worker proposal fund as a number of people have proposed. In that case, no additional SBD would be created relative to what is created today.
IMO the overall pool has to in some way be fixed in STEEM as that is the only way to have it be a set portion of inflation (where ever that comes from). So the amount of SBD that could be created would be effectively capped by the amount of STEEM going to the overall system, as is the case with current reward payouts.
I guess that means that some items at the bottom of the queue may not get funded because the available (SBD) payouts are not sufficient if the STEEM price drops. In turn that could create some issues of people being willing to take on work when their funding may get cut off if the STEEM price drops. I don't think this is avoidable in a system with finite resources.
This sounds like a potentially fruitful idea. But would the greater community have any impact on what jobs get approved, or would it simply be a matter of the very wealthiest choosing everything that happens?
Because as I understand it, the wealthiest are currently electing the witnesses who are deciding in turn the updates that will happen through voting, so I wonder if this would actually change much beyond giving some community members a chance to do some freelance work.
Please correct me if I am misinformed or have misunderstood anything.
I think it's a safe assumption that the whales/dolphins will have a large influence in what gets funded. While in theory a lot of smaller voters could make a difference, my guess is that many simply won't vote.
But it could definitely change the current situation, in which decisions about what work gets done is pretty much left up to Steemit Inc. And where pretty much all the blockchain work is done by Steemit Inc.
What interests me most about this proposal of yours is if it were applied to a nation's government. Perhaps it would be best to make every vote count for the same as opposed to having the wealthiest dictate all decisions, and there would also have to be a reliable means of ensuring there are no vulnerabilities that would allow for people to vote more than once. But such a democratic voting system applied directly to a nation's tax goals would allow the people to have a say in where the government's funds go - to what projects they should support and to which ones they should not. The people could even vote on things such as minimum wage, their own tax rates and government worker's salaries. I don't think that many are interested in voting nowadays, because it doesn't seem to make much of a difference. But if people had the chance to vote on how funding was to be used in their communities and countries, without having to place trust in a person, I believe far more people would be interested in taking the time to do so.
Something like this could potentially go wrong if not enough people understood where best to be spending the money, but, if done correctly, I also think that there is a chance that this system you propose, if given to an entire nation to decide the use of tax funds, could change the world in the most profound of ways.
Yes, I touched upon this same idea earlier in my reply to oldtimer. It's ideas like this that drive a lot of my interest in cryptocurrency.
If you ever want to talk more about such things... It's very close to the core of my work. Alx
What may mirror POS better on a national level is being able to decide where your taxes are spent. It would then become a once a year decision on ones tax form with a list of all governmental departments and the ability to earmark what percentage of your taxes go to each on the list.
With a worker proposal system like this -- is it possible to have the project budget payment held in escrow until a deliverable is received? Or is payment guaranteed as soon as the proposal is voted in?
Only asking because there's, at least in my eyes, a bit of a recurring theme around here of tall promises and people left not getting what they asked for.
Yes, it's possible via an escrow intermediary. In practice, it might be difficult to find competent programmers who will work on those terms, unless they have other paying jobs (assuming we're talking about a programming proposal). But it's not impossible (we were willing to work on that basis to implement our rocksdb proposal).
I guess if project deliverables are never... delivered... then that would likely prevent the worker from winning future contracts. And likely, projects wont get funded unless there seems to be some realistic expectation for successful delivery.
Thanks for the response.
Thank you for explaining this incredibly interesting idea in a way that even a layman like me can understand (mostly).
I am more of a community and content guy than a tech guy, so please forgive me if this question is based on a faulty premise due to my lack of expertise.
It seems to me that in addition to their required duties, some people expect witnesses to do other tasks that will help increase the value of steem (develop apps, lead projects, etc.).
Is it possible that this system would remove that secondary expectation of witnesses and they would only need to perform those required tasks? If that is the case, some of their expected workload would be removed. If their job became easier, it would make sense that they would earn fewer rewards. Perhaps part of the funding for this project could come from that reduction in witness rewards.
If a witness wanted to earn more rewards, this system would allow them to earn rewards for valuable contributions. Therefore witnesses who are going "above and beyond the call of duty" would earn more rewards than those who are simply performing the basic tasks. I am not saying that it is wrong to only perform the required task, it is quite on the contrary. Those tasks are essential and the witnesses should be rewarded. I am just saying this system may help create a more fair distribution of witness rewards while providing incentive for non-witnesses to make valuable contributions as well.
Yes, one of the original intents behind the creation of a work proposal system for BitShares was to rationalize payments for things like code development.
Prior to the deployment of a worker proposal system on BitShares (BitShares 1.0 timeframe), for example, one of my companies ran 4 witnesses/block producers to help pay some of the costs of the development we were doing for the blockchain. Needless to say, this wasn't an ideal point for decentralization of block production (although there were 30+ witnesses back then, so it's not quite as bad as it sounds).
Whether this constitutes an argument from reducing the pay of witnesses now is really up to your opinion of what witnesses are being paid for currently. Some witnesses campaign for their position based on their outside work, others explicitly state that their work and responsibilities as a witness are tied to upkeep and security of their node and thoughtful decisions regarding upgrading their software (especially in the case of soft and hard forks).
Thanks for the response. Basically it is tough to say without a definition of what the essential "basic tasks" are, how much it costs to perform them, and what is the appropriate reward for performing them (I do not believe people should simply break even and do this for free). If we knew that amount, then we could decide if there is a surplus of witness rewards that could be used to fund worker proposals. Thanks for explaining this so clearly. As far as figuring out the tasks and rewards... I think I'll leave that one to the experts.
During the process where Steemit cut the fees paid to the worker, I believe that pay cut was justified in part with the idea that witnesses should no longer be expected to be coders, marketers, etc. Of course, up and coming witnesses looking to break into the top 20 still will often promise to do more, in hopes of getting elected.
Worker proposals will hopefully put this idea to rest and allow for a more rationalized payment system where witness pay is just for the tasks that all witnesses perform and worker proposal pay is for doing other forms of useful work like running API servers.
This has a distinct advantage because it allows the payment amount to be tailored to fit the task instead of doing a "one payment size fits all" which is obviously never going to be fair.
Take from rewards......manipulating the bigger structure is unnecessary and looks terrible.
Agree.
ǝɹǝɥ sɐʍ ɹoʇɐɹnƆ pɐW ǝɥ┴
I highly disagree with the worker proposal system!
EDIT: I've further explained my argument in 2 videos on dtube:
It's good in theory, but not in practice. History is full good examples of why it doesn't work:
BTS had the best tech for years, and look how far they came? They are barely in the top 50... all this because of "worker proposal system" that has hindered their progress. Because their governance is "too decentralized" they are at major risk of becoming obsolete, while newer more centralized versions of BTS are popping up left and right. Look at IOST, they are almost in the top 50 and their mainnet wont even launch until next month.
Furthermore, BTS doesn't even have a working mobile app! Why? Because of worker proposals that are "attempting" to make one for ages now...
The only people that would benefit from a worker proposal system are "hired guns / contractors" like you @blocktrades
Nothing personal, I respect your proposition and work, but your opinion is very biased in this matter.
I hate to say it, but for the good of the ecosystem and ultimately the price of STEEM, there MUST be some level of centralization like Steemit, Inc. offers.
I highly disagree with your comment. We have learned over time that we can't trust a centralized entity like steemit to take care of everything. Especially when there is no clear line as of where community dev should start and when steemit inc dev should stop. A simple example is steemit.com. This website is terribly outdated and is supposed to be the flagship of our blockchain. Or what about communities or smts ? Or marketing ? Also having a centralized entity means that we all sit and wait while steemit inc does the lifting because they have the funds. If the company has a huge crisis (like if they laid off 70% of their employees). And we know that they will be delaying smts to reduce costs what do we do ? Well this is where we as the community will be able to pick up the slack thanks to the proposal system.
Right now the current situation is "do things and get high up enough in the witnesses to get paid for it" but this is flawed as witnesses should be elected on trust and their capacity to keep the network secure not side projects. The worker system would allow us to clearly separate things.
On the bias issue: I haven't operated a worker proposal on BitShares for a number of years now, nor did we ever spend much from the ones we ran. The majority of the funds from the primary worker proposal we ran mostly sit idle to this day, because we haven't seen a strong need to do anything to justify spending them.
As far as your "in practice" argument, we apparently have a completely different view of the situation. I see lots of positive work done by the current contractors being paid by worker proposals. I think the worker proposal system has done a lot to sustain BitShares when it's core team left the coin. Without it, I don't think BitShares would have its current marketcap ranking. Along these lines, it's useful to note that BitShares was actually higher ranked than Steem until the recent and mostly unexplained pump in the price of Steem.
I really disagree with your argument on centralization of the development process. Taking a look at the results from Steemit and from BitShares workers over the past few years and looking at how much money was spent by both groups, I think it's obvious that BitShares funds have been spent much more efficiently.
@blocktrades, by the way, the real "bias" I was talking about is the fact that you already do some work by requesting funds and this system will make it easier for you to do so.
Sure, but the same could be said of anyone who makes a similar proposal to do the work. Should the proposal be ignored because anyone who could propose to do it is potentially biased?
Why not just say that this proposal is biased to all programmers? 😆
Is the work being done not more important than who is doing it?
@blocktrades I agree that the worker proposal system is an effective plan B.
However, It is not something we need at the moment since the steem core team is not leaving.
Effectively, they left around the end of 2016, which was the last time that anything was being accomplished at a meaningful rate.
Since then we have had a change to the reward curve (mostly a coding tweak), some other minor blockchain coding tweaks, a few UI tweaks in steemit.com, a few security patches, and the RC system. As well as total non-performance on the 2017 roadmap, and non-completion and non-delivery of SMTs which was essentially the 2018 roadmap. And finally obstructionism mixed with outright hostility on outside involvement with the development process. The security patches are important and the RC system was significant development but none of this is remotely close to two years of work for a team (and also rolled out poorly).
I do not even remotely share your confidence in the "core team" whether they have explicitly announced their departure or not.
Agree, we are "stuck in a rut" ...
I share your non-confidence that anything will be accomplished at a meaningful rate in the future ...
I wished there was someone that could convince me otherwise.
I would say it's rather late to think about such things at the point when a core team exits as a substantial drop in price could result before things stabilize. Also, lately there's been a pretty overwhelming desire by the community to bring in more outside developers. This proposal is really about trying to decentralize that.
I think this sort of skepticism is healthy and I would like to see a more detailed debate with pros and cons supporting their arguments in detail. One could also look at some slightly different systems such as Dash and try to make the case why they work better or worse than the Bitshares model.
@smooth I'm not an expert on the Dash ecosystem (it's still on my list), however I can say with certainty that I have researched the BTS ecosystem and spoke to many people over there and the the proposal above is just a step backwards.
As I said I very much like your input but I would like to see more specifics on how, when, and why the Bitshares system has not been productive. I don't know much about the Bitshares system but I've been watching the Dash system for a few years and have been impressed with how much it has accomplished and also how it has evolved. But that is not to say it too hasn't had failures and critics.
SmartCash has a similar system. They have 70% of the rewards for the projects. Each Smart counts as a vote. The project is managed by three wallets who approve or reject the projects in the last hours of voting no matter how many people have supported or rejected it. The same thing can happen here if a system is implemented that is not only based on the amount of SP
Who gets to do the approving or rejecting and how are they chosen?
All those who have Smart in the official wallet can vote. Each Smart equals one vote. The more Smart you have the more you can influence the results of the proposals.
There came a time when proposals were no longer approved and the community realized that there were only 3 wallets that rejected with negative votes, with few hours left until the voting time ended. I speak of proposals with more than 90% acceptance and from one moment to another they happened to have 80% rejection. Many have left and that project is almost dead because the founders have the greatest power to vote and do not want to approve because they lowered the currency and do not want to spend
I'm all about having yes and no's about this proposal but imho a coin not being in top 50 should not disqualify it's infrastructure of in this case a decentralised worker proposal.
Furthermore IMHO BTS worker system is not hindering it's progress? I feel it is a great example of a truly decentralised organisation. All development is paid by the blockchain itself. The alternative would be a centralised authority paying developers, but there is no such thing (anymore?) on BTS.
For example:
I think Steemit Inc and this worker infrastructure can co-exist.
Imagine Inc would actually get paid through a worker :)
In reality, the BTS worker proposal system is just recently displaying some good movement with the BBF and (yet another) mobile app which will hopefully work this time. But in general, the WP system should still be a plan B if Steemit Inc completely turns is back. For now it doesn't make much since, and BTS WP system hasn't been too good in the longer history.
@aggroed has discussed how Hardfork 20, and a few other updates ultimately cost 10 million Steem in 2018 (Steem traded in a range of $1.00 to $6.00 USD for that year, so they sold about $10,000,000 to $30,000,000 USD worth of Steem, give or take).
I think one of the concerns is that @steemit Inc. might be somewhat incompentent in terms of getting their money's worth, and developer groups outside of Steemit Inc. (I.e. @blocktrades) might be able to do a better job, faster and for a cheaper price - if @ned @elipowell and @steemit Inc. agree to this proposal, I think it would confirm that. It would ultimately be a wise choice for them though, to admit their short comings and hire outside talent if it gets a better bang for their buck - Afterall, they have quite a large stake, and whatever is good for the Steem blockchain and Steem, would reflect in their net-worth.
I also think it's foolish to create a Plan B once Plan A is unworkable. The whole point of having a Plan B is to prepare, in case something unexpected happens to Plan A!!!
It doesn't work in practice. Like democracy.
Large SP holders will push their proposals and collect money. Like we can see with witnesses.
I think the jury's out on democracies, since I suppose we've never had a true democracy to my knowledge (yes, I hear some people try to argue that California functions that way, but I never find their argument terribly convincing). In my opinion a republic (i.e. a representative democracy) like what we have in the US is quite a different animal.
Technology is finally reaching the point where it might be possible to experiment with true democracies, but I think it's unlikely to happen in a major country because of inertia and automated responses people have like "it'll be mob rule".
I'm personally interested in what kind of structures could be setup for a "modern democracy" based off improved decision making that's possible with widespread access to computer technology.
My feeling is that we will see such democracies form in the future, but via associations formed via member consensus, that will exist as super-national entities where the members still reside in "nation states".
Cryptocurrency communites are, in my opinion, one initial form that such associations can take (although they're frequently not democratic, they are do form via member consensus).
My long term hope is that exploration of such communities will lead us to discover new and better forms of government based off democratic principles that ultimately displace existing governments based on narrow-minded nation state boundaries.
Don't get me wrong here. I totally agree with your point of view but I think that our so-called western society is just not ready yet. We're still many, many years away. The third-world countries are even further.
Just look at the farse with the US or any elections. And yet 90% of people follow their crap.
Thank you for your response and time.
You're a great asset to steem community.
Thanks for writing this comment @blocktrades I have thought about blockchains like Steem, and their possible role in creating new forms of Governmemt.
I am not sure that Steem or any of the other blockchains will ultimately lead to new forms of Government, but I think it's possible, and I'm intrigued with the idea of it 😊
This is exactly what sparked my interest in DPOS. My trading of some BTC for STEEM was not done as an investment but to have a greater voice/stake in this social experiment.
Because of this philosophical alignment my support for @lukestokes.mhth has been re-assigned to @blocktrades.
Obviously my Dolphin vote is not going to make or break you; yet it is my feeling that the greater the individual votes a witness has (as opposed to stake) affords a witness greater credability.
Readers are invited to decern for themselves that premise in the following link...
http://steemreports.com/witness-voters/
Thanks for your vote, they are always appreciated, regardless of the stake weight.
On the topic of consensual organizations, we're just beginning to look at development of a new kind of reputation system that I think may help make such cooperation become more efficient. It's too early to say much about it yet, as it's in a very earlier design phase and we haven't even started writing any code, but I hope to have something to report in a few months on the progress.
Will be following with interest. 👍
looks like we need a hardfork to implement this
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Yes, it would require a hardfork.
not a problem, right?
Yes, hardforking isn't technically difficult.
dash and a few other have similar logic. It seems to work at good times.
I'm up to this change! :)
As with most of these proposals it runs into the large problem of funding or partially funding blockchain development which then has no smooth path to being enacted by the witnesses. At least in this case the developers would get paid, but we're still looking at a system that primarily generates orphan code by funding the worker voters' priority without reconciling it with any anticipation of the witnesses' priority at time of implementation.
I feel like this needs to be solved somehow before investing in a system. Unfortunately I don't have any good ideas.
The non-blockchain-development parts of this seem like a reasonably good idea, and the people already here seem to be having a good discussion of where the money comes from that I don't really feel the need to add to.
Proposals and witness are voted for by the same group of stakeholders. It's not unlikely to assume that successfully implemented code designed via a worker proposal will have significant momentum to be incorporated by witnesses who could easily be voted out by those same stakeholders.
I don't think this is true given the likely relative participation rates. Unless a large stakeholder sets the Refund standard particularly high, it's very likely that any faction able to drum up support on a one-time basis will be able to fund a proposal, simply because most witness voters aren't here all the time. (And if the Refund standard is particularly high it likely precludes all non-blockchain-development projects entirely. Perhaps it would be good to have separate pools.)
Consider 50% curation as an example. Given the support it has been shown, it's almost certain this could gather enough stake to vote into the development queue. Yet we thankfully aren't particularly close to a supermajority of witnesses supporting it. But if code development were funded and finished, it would essentially lock that faction into place, never allowing them to move on and leading to permanent conflict over the issue.
History has shown in the case of bitshares that the refund standard was set very high, and in such a way that it easily weeded out questionable proposals.
In general, a lot of your arguments make assumptions that I find very questionable. For example, I think you're flat out wrong on the support level of witnesses for 50% curation (along with some of the other proposed changes to curation). In my opinion, I think a strong majority were in favor of the idea, and the primary blocking issue was just finding someone willing to do the work for free when Steemit devs didn't show a lot of interest in taking on the task themselves.
Workers being paid daily without proof of progress opens this up to abuse. Perhaps payment upon completion would be better and completion should be validated by Oracles that are tasked with evaluating the effectiveness of worker proposals. What ideas do you have around accountability of workers?
I agree. I think funds should be approved and then paid by milestones. If the milestones are not approved the fund should go back into the pool.
This should at least be an option.
Maybe both options should exist, one option to create a bounty based on milestone payment release, verified by trusted oracles (possibly also voted in) and perhaps a daily/weekly/monthly type payment for fixed position jobs like community ambassadors/marketers etc, those should also however have evaluations, at intervals to rate their performance. The flexibility to create either type of worker proposal will be very useful.
I'm glad that you are trying to help on this STEEM journey, and it's good to hear that @ned would be interested in it.
I would rather some of the inflation we are already getting be redirected as opposed to a new additional 1% be added.
A Powerful Blockchain EM-Powered by their Users?
DApps Possible!
Well @BlockTrades and Steemians, to be honest and out of the Dev Specs, Inflation, numbers and % I think this is the materialization of the change we need.
We need DOERS and get a return for the work, so for this idea man, hats off for you!
You found the shape we were looking for... I started to make the same thing with @pro-motion and I truly believe it's the way to go ahead and make a sanity in here.
Chapeau!
👍😎
Hope So! Thanks for stopping by
Steem is full of doers, but whales need an AI tool to detect them : @treeplanter, @cleanplanet, @askanything, @ecodesigns, @peerquery ...
Hi @ChrisAiki! To be true I think that Steem has many people that want to DO things, -want- is different to DO, and many people that talks and talk, but saying that the chain is full of DOers well... I see it totally different.
You can count them by dozens and no more, and here is not about Whales, is about having the proper tool to get new investors and get rewards for the work we DO... that's the key!
Not waiting for whales... to discover your work! Is a fairy tale that many want to believe, maybe two years ago it could be a reality but now in here everything is about business and we are trying to see a clear panorama to start playing that game.
yes, we need A Worker Proposal System For Steem !
https://steemit.com/contest/@chrisaiki/contest-steem-is-fun
Lol
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I am strongly against any new inflation being added, however, I would strongly support any inflation needed being pulled from the witness allocated portion. That is the least 'value added' portion of the inflation break-down.
Good work!👍
good luck @blocktrades
That's a good idea but what could be the main problem, I have asked in my dpoll post.
https://steemit.com/dpoll/@aftabkhan10/what-could-be-the-main-problem-in-a-worker-proposal-system-for-steem
Thanks for developing this proposal. It offers some intriguing possibilities and opens a healthy discussion. :)
Objection.
Can @blocktrades make a mobile dapp for their service?
It seems a little difficult to always go to the browser to make a exchange.
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All I can see are witnesses agreeing to this idea more. So as a Plankton, all I can do is hope for the best. If the plan fails, hopefully I don't spend too much. May we all profit from this. May we all be blessed by the @lordgod of STEEM.
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Hacer propuestas que favorezcan al trabajador es muy positivo.
Se que los mayores beneficios serán para los admi nistradores de Stemmit, pero hay que considerar que nosotros, los trabajadores, queremos mayores beneficios y al mismo tiempo que nuestro trabajo sea más cómodo y placentero.
Una cosa trae a la otra.
Me preocupo más, escribo más y recibo más, pero con comodidad.
Mi rendimiento puede ser mayor, pero mis ganancias también, tienen que ser mayores.
Hagan lo mejor y que lo mejor nos beneficie.
Saludos.
хороший пост
Hi
Help me am new here
How we can help you?
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Thanx
@saal If you need help, you can go and write to me through Discord ;)
Yes....
Fantastic idea. As some have mentioned, no to inflation, it was already a turnoff for investors.
Effective idea. Thanks for sharing the cool idea and important update.
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This is a very interesting idea. Wonder if the community could organize a funding to pay for the implementation...
It's about 250k STEEM(using $0.40 STEEM price). I don't know what blocktrades would like, but you think it's possible to reach that much funding? I'd be willing to donate a % of my post earnings to reach that goal(though in the end it won't be much). Steemit.com takes 1% beneficiary for funding this? I really would like to see this go through. Then we need someone to make a front end for it.
I am glad that you are putting this forward as having a way to fund development from the blockchain inflation without having to have contentious posts saying "for development" voted would be great. I am very interested to see how this will develop over time and whether people will get behind it enough to start development.
I would support this with .005% added inflation, .01 is to much. I also like paid in SBD and the fee to propose. I would include a 1 week delay from proposal to first payment to allow time for proper voting. There also needs to be a minimum threshold of chain wide vote weight requirement (taking into account the none voting stake Steemit Inc. holds).
The minimum threshold vote is set dynamically by stakeholders by the stakeweight they give to the refund proposal. I think this method is better than setting a hard limit, because it works by measuring "voting stake" versus existing stake. This eliminates problems like ignoring steemit's stake and even more problematic "dead stake" that can't vote due to loss of keys.
Steemit's stake, as things are progressing currently, will be hidden and unaccountable, and can easily interfere and manipulate the allocations. Given likely voter participation rates, this can be done with even a small portion of it. IMO this is a poison pill that is a huge drag on the whole idea and makes it not a particularly useful solution to the issues brought forward by the "events" of the last week as you have described it.
I flat out do not trust the competence, judgment, and intentions of Steemit given experience with the past three years and I'm not anxious to support yet another system they can continue to screw up.
I realize this isn't terribly constructive but unfortunately I consider the "events" of the last week to be somewhat fatal to Steem ever truly recovering from Steemit's noxious influence, much as I might like to see it happening.
I'm also very unhappy about the powerdown to the exchanges of Steemit's stake, and I don't disagree with many of the things you've said about it's impact. I'm still vaguely hopeful they will realize it's a publicity disaster and stop it at some point.
Agreed, and somehow the community is prepared to swallow that poison pill again... until... it's fatal.
Perhaps the inflation rate could scale as required with a maximum threshold.
Edit: the other thing is to reduce the interest rate slightly to make up the difference?
I am not sure what you mean, "the other thing is to reduce the interest rate slightly to make up the difference?"
BT replied to you.
I mean that there is an interest percentage paid on stake isn't there? If I recall (don't quote), 19% of the pool is paid in interest to account, 10% to witnesses. If the interest rate is reduced slightly it would mean that the entire staked blockchain (those who will benefit the most from development) will fund it.
Cool idea! I look forward to hearing more.
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I'm a little confused about why we need to increase inflation by 1%. Can't ned just use that 40M Steem to upvote said account? That would leech far more value than 1% from the current reward pool.
I don't know, hardforking to increase inflation on a platform that already has high inflation? Seems like a bad idea. I'm not necessarily against it though.
There's no strict need to increase inflation, and the 1% is an "example amount" (e.g. means for example). Another possibility is simply to take inflation from an existing source. A third possibility is just to have it funded from donations. As a mentioned, this choice will be one of the most contentious decisions to be made, I think. I'm personally ok with many of the available options for the funding, although I think just using donations won't be sufficient.
Good proposal.
Simple to understand 👏👏👏
I’m not sure that this is needed since we already have two different reward pools where “workers” can promote their projects and seek rewards. Users have been doing it for 2.5 years. They can also solicit delegations (which has been done many times) and direct donations. If their projects are valued, people will support them...with their own stake, not socialize the costs.
That said...
If we are to have a worker proposal system, I would suggest not adding to existing inflation. We already have a rather large supply of tokens. Instead, I would take 0.5% from the posting and 0.5% from the witness reward pools. And we would need to carefully monitor the SBD debt load.
I like the burn worker idea and would definitely support that. In fact, I’m working on a project right now that will involve burning tokens.
Raising recurring funds in the quantities required to pay for tasks like software development isn't really feasible using posts, in my opinion.
With new ideas, I think it's important to avoid quickly trying to label them. The worker proposal system is actually similar in many ways to shareholder voting (without the same contractual obligations that go along with a "real" company) so if we characterize the process as socializing the cost, then I think companies are also socializing their expenditures. Probably the biggest difference is there's no "representatives" (aka company officers) that make the final decision on how the funds are spent.
In general, I've tried to spec the system so that if the stakeholders don't want inflation, they can just burn it up. In the end, the aim of the design is to put the decision into the hands of stakeholders without requiring a hardfork if they change their mind about it.
Also, as I've said a few times at this point in other comments, the 1% is just an example amount, and I'm also personally fine with the funding coming from an existing inflation source. My description is pretty much a placeholder, because there's a number of options for that.
When I say “socialize the costs,” I mean that the burden of supporting/paying developers can be put on the entire community from the limited/shared pool, even if a super-majority of stakeholders don’t want the development that would be funded.
When grants of money can be given so easily to developers with little to no risk to any individual voter, chances are that accountability will be lacking for both the fund allocators and the developers. After all, it’s not their money that’s being spent. It’s the same problem we see with government and tax dollars. Are politicians rushing to give their own money to the state projects that they so proudly support with their rhetoric? Of course not. But they’ll certainly use that shared pool of cash that didn’t come out of their bank accounts...and they have no reason to make sure it’s well-spent either.
I know software development isn’t cheap. I know developers want to be paid for their work. But I also think that, if the proposed development from a trusted person/entity is truly valued by investors, then those investors will find a way to fund it and the developers should be able to solicit funding for it.
I know this is fairly new tech and some new concepts when it comes to organizing and developing, but people and businesses still need to put in the leg-work and not just hope for token giveaways.
But that conversation is practically irrelevant and probably a distraction, so I’ll just say this...
As long as there isn’t an increase in the inflation rate, I really don’t have much of a problem with a small percentage of the overall rewards pool going to development. I just hope that these funds are more carefully considered and allocated than post rewards and that the vetting of developers is better than that of our witnesses.
I would have serious concerns about large accounts (like the soon-to-be-anonymous Steemit accounts) directing funds to their own “projects” that are disguised as “community development.”
But ultimately, I would be more in favor of a development fund that operates on actual donations rather than inflation-funded reward pools. If there aren’t enough people willing to support useful development, then we have a real problem.
Just to briefly address your first point: if a majority of the stakeholders don't want a proposal to be funded, they can always vote the refund worker proposal in front of that proposal and the undesirable proposal won't be funded.
In fact, this ability to stop all funding actually upset a lot of people in BitShares in the distant past, because some large stakeholders decided they didn't want to fund any more work by the core team at that time and did exactly that.
Nothing about the "worker" system prevents it, if stakeholders want to organize things that way.
An "officer" can offer their service to the stakeholders as manager of a revenue stream and get voted in as a "worker". This, in practice, is how much of the Dash budget gets allocated (it goes to one item which funds a for-profit company with permanent management to carry on long-term development). However, importantly: a) the company can get defunded if it doesn't perform to the satisfaction of the stakeholders, and b) other smaller items such as sponsorships, app developers, etc. can get funded independently of the company.
In part this is why I am not a favor of the "worker" label as it tends to encourage a certain expectation around usage and structure vs. something a bit more conceptually neutral such as "budget item"
Yes, nothing about the system prevents it from being done. And in fact, one such company exists today in BitShares that pays a lot of the core programmers. I just meant that in it's "basic state" that stakeholders can vote for individual budget items, unlike in traditional corporations where that would be considered quite strange. I was trying to clarify where my analogy to standard shareholder voting tends to break down as part of my argument for why I think it's unreasonable to call it socializing the costs. Costs shared by an organizational members shouldn't be necessarily be considered socialized costs in the stigmatized sense.