Preface
I've also refrained from tagging people involved out of respect and knowing how annoyed they likely are from being tagged or "at'd" over this particular situation. Upvote to increase visibility please.
Defunding Developers to Fuel the HBD Stabilizer Initiative
So for those unwilling to risk being struck down by voicing their concerns about the situation I will gladly be your martyr if it comes down to that. Although I suspect this post will not incite instant whale wars or cruel punishment to myself, but rather act to open up the potential for more truthful and free expression of ones thoughts on this whole matter. The hope is to find a middle ground where all parties win, with some sort of equilibrium being reached between burning much needed developer funding chasing a run-away peg function that sort of sucks with getting development proposal money flowing back into the people's hands who ultimately give HIVE it's value.
Fixing a Fundamentally Flawed Peg Implementation
I'm not saying the HBD peg is a lost cause by any means, I think with some serious ingenuity and work it could be brought into standards of other pegged assets in terms of time to react to market, but as it currently sits, the systems in place, even with the @hbdstabilizer doing it's fund dumping, simply isn't going to be a viable way to tackle the pegging problem long term. Currently the experiment being conducted with the @hbdstabilizer while providing a decent amount of upwards pressure on HIVE price seems to not quite be the magic sauce HBD needs to maintain a peg, especially at the cost of a fair sized group of dedicated 3rd party HIVE developers income.
While obviously not something that can be rolled out quickly or even in the next hard fork we should be taking a serious look on how networks performing the pegging function in their ecosystem are accomplishing it and take some notes from their playbooks to optimizer our own lacking system.
Taking food out of the mouths of HIVE developers in favour of using the money to wrangle what ultimately boils down to a weak or flawed pegging system implementation just sort of sucks.
The peg has been sort of a joke over the past years, and while we've seen periods in the past where the peg has been holding somewhat as intended, the same can be said for times where the peg was way out to lunch and I'm entirely unsure what spawned the immediate interest or urgency now leading to the attempt we're currently seeing to prod the "baked in" lackluster pegging system into something closer to its original vision. When it boils down to the guys buidling out our ecosystem being paid or trying to fight a market which in all honesty we're entirely at the whim at regardless of how much HBD we dump on it seems like a no brainer you pay the folks building the empire over trying to make a historically weakly pegged currency back to its intended value amount.
Long Reaching Ripples of Developer Defunding
While it's damn near impossible to deny the excitement of the pursuit of trying new experiments in our ecosystem in attempts at taming market prices should it be done at the cost of developers livelyhoods? Now while not every developer currently writing code for HIVE depends solely on their income from their proposals to fund their development endevours there are many of us that do.
By choosing to pursue peg wrangling on the open markets over ensuring that the many 3rd party developers working here for the HIVE team are making a respectable income while developing the ecosystem out further may end up casting a negative connotation amongst large stake holders valuing the trivially pegged HBD price over having value being paid to individuals who are actively working to build out the ecosystem bringing orders of magnitude more value available to our ecosystem than any pegging of price will ever be able to. At the end of the day we're surrounded by examples of other graphene based networks sharing the same DNA as HIVE and their pegged currency having been left to it's own devices to do as it wishes having little to no negative effects on the other blockchains in question.. it starts to all boil down to a question of "where do the large stakeholders on HIVE place their priority?"..
Is priority of our ecosystem and its large stakeholders to strive to develop, evolve and grow by bringing new applications and completely unique to HIVE network services online, adding massive value to everyone involved in time.. or trying to fight free trade on an open market to make some basically inconsequential number behave like how Ned envisioned it or whatever?
These are some of the trains of thought that must be taken into consideration beyond what the experiment has shown us so far. While I do see some positive effect on HIVE price due to all the HBD being dumped on them and used to drive up HIVE prices, if its at the cost of our developers having to struggle financially or be forced to seek work elsewhere in lieu of funding being revoked to try some experimental and so far not terribly effective wrangling of prices on an open and volatile market then I think we're sending the entire crypto community the wrong message, not to mention potentially harming relations with developers already here on HIVE that were recieving funding only to be cut down at the knee because a number controlled by the markets isn't low or high enough..
Having a functional pegged currency would be cool, but paying our developers should be the obvious choice over it in all situations. Some of the developers here on HIVE are well off financially or high enough witness ranked they can afford to develop stuff regardless of having their DHF funding or not. Others like myself who perhaps aren't as financially stable as some are the ones who end up taking the brunt of the decision to favour pegging HBD over helping support them while they further develop our ecosystem. And yes, while the peg is far above its normal rate the DHF funded proposals take in supplemental income because of it, it should be mentioned that the folks who develop on here are the ones who ultimately hold the fate of HIVE's future and success in their hands... Not some known to be borked token price pegging scheme that's never really kept up.
An interesting thing to come out of this though was fellow HIVE witness and developer good-karma coming up with a script to pay back additional funds a proposal might take in due to the peg. I support this idea and think his implementation of this was a brilliant move in the right direction and effective immediately I'll be implementing this into my 2 proposals for Hive.Loans(5 days left @ $42/day) and the Hive Smart Chain(63 days left @ $120/day)
Continuation of Development Without Funding
However without funding priority in development queue and development time spent on them ends up getting canniblized as one is forced to seek out other sources of income to make ends meet. Certainly I'm not the only developer in the ecosystem that's come to this sort of stance and honestly I'd much rather be able to tell folks I'm paid to develop applications as a 3rd party through community funding support rather than having to tell folks I'm freelancing and looking for work.
So with this all laid out as it is. I'd like to ask that the hbdstabilizer experiment be dialed back a bit and get some of our development dedicated individuals back into their proposal support positions, getting some food in their cupboards, some wind in their sails and lastly a means of making HIVE a feasible employment option for those willing and able to come and put in work here, for HIVE, rather than have that talent drift off to greener pastures.
We got a lot of talented people here on HIVE, plenty of damn cool projects being built that will completely refactor what HIVE utility defines as.. But you've got to support the crews that support you.. And last time I checked HBD was just a mediocre financial tool that has very little meaning in HIVEs success in the long run. Pegging HBD will happen, but it won't be done effectively how it's being done now. HBD needs it's methodolgy and functionality used to maintain peg examined and corrected. And while that is being pondered at and worked on we can get our developers together, get them well funded and let them sculpt the future of HIVE through their efforts, supporting up the network that supported them. It doesn't take long for a few of these positive feedback loops to take hold within a crypto ecosystem and catapult it's value immensely.
Return Support to Developers, Build a Massive Future Success.
or
Try and peg a token against a market that doesn't give a fuck.
Choice seems pretty obvious to me. :)
Thanks for reading folks. Got ideas, concerns or just want to vent? Hit up the comments!
PS. Hive.Loans alpha testing starts in the next week or two hopefully. :D
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The great thing about blockchain is that nobody can take your name off your creations.
Your name goes into history without any further advocacy.
The good people won't forget what you have done for us, Klye.
I can't speak for the bad ones.
Just git-r-done and wait for the glory and accolades to come rolling in, iyam.
Working on it. Just about got this system audit shit working.
Site will check itself every minute to make sure nothing fucked up is going on. I figure automated public audits are good for security and transparency. :D
<3
I can't wait to loan money to suckers at interest, that is some top level crapitalism, there.
I can't wait till we do more than a million HIVE in lending volume in a month. :)
Oh, yes, aggie hit that with his diesel pools.
More liquid hive not screwing with the pool.
Might get some off the exchanges, too.
I would be all in favor of trying to stabilize HBD... IF the token were only an internally traded asset. But we're talking about trying to guide an open and free investment market, where speculators who have never even visited Hive are crunching numbers and trading on technicals. When HBD spiked to almost $2.50, the 24-hour volume was $8.5 million on HBD traded. We don't have the resources to counter that... and HBD was never set up as a stablecoin like a USDT which has built-in mechanisms that make it all but impossible to move the price.
And you're exactly right... in the meantime, those developing meaningful dApps on Hive are getting screwed.
It's not an optimal situation for sure. I took a week away from the keyboard after the funding got pulled to get away from it all and try to think of the broader picture beyond my own situation and whatnot. While the HBD stabilization is a cool idea it's simply piss in the wind for lack of a better term trying to gloss over a greater underlaying problem with HBD as it's coded now for being pegged.
This is a saying that comes to mind here.. I know the guys behind it all have the best intention but sometimes it takes a low level grunt like me to frame it from a different angle so people can see the very real downsides to this experiment.
Once you get this thing going, you won't need any funding because it should supply a stream of income we can leverage.
Yep. that is the whole reason I develop.. To fund more developing.
Doesn't getting paid for some time with HBD trading above $1 make up for the days of a proposal not being funded? I thought this was the idea behind unvoting proposals. A proposal would have made more or less the same money as if they were funded for all days and HBD stayed at $1.
Still not sure why developers should get their funding axed and essentially punished in a sense for HBD prices being high. Sure the extra income was nice for some I'm sure but it sure as heck put me in a precarious situation budget wise.
That is a bit different. If you are struggling financially, it seems like a different conversation to have than what you have written in this post. If you put a post about your situation, to give transparency to the people who have voted for your proposal and want to see it come to fruition, then I would imagine some of them would be happy to support you further (by upvoting your proposal so it gets funded again, or in other ways).
You are a dev being funded by a decentralized community, just be transparent and open with the community and many will respond to you kindly. :) We have the same goals, after all.
For my part, I will start voting for your daily time reports, my upvote is not huge but hope it starts adding up if others do it as well. And you can surely put another proposal if you haven't been able to finish the dev work before the current one expires. And always ask for direct and honest feedback so you know which aspects the community is not happy about, and which it is happy about. I think not meeting a deadline is no big deal, happens all the time, funding is there to keep you going, just needs both sides to keep a long-term partnership going and overcome the various speed bumps along the journey.
I'm at a spot currently where I could probably make more money doing something else but honestly building stuff on graphene is somewhat fulfilling.
Highly appreciate the support and the fact you took time out of your day to reply thoughtfully. As someone who spends waaaay too much time in front of a keyboard I can tell by your response you actually read what was written. Atleast someone did. <3
Deadlines are guidelines at best being lone dev on lots of stuff. Currently trying to juggle things and do triage to get the most pressing things done in a remotely timely manner.
The community being able to talk to developers and have the develop the feedback into improvements is a huge thing. Some guys take honest offence when you suggest changing part of their baby, I've learned to value user feedback lots over the years.
If it's not one thing.. it's another. such is life! How one adapts or reacts to the change I guess is the only metrics that matter in the end.
For sure. I really liked your proposals and how they gave back to the community in a very synergistic way. I'm sure this caught the eye of many others from the community as well, and we saw one of your proposals get funded right from day one. (The HVM one probably seems really ambitious and I guess that's why it hasn't been funded - in all such non-funded scenarios I think the best thing to do is to really actively request feedback and iterate on the idea and/or the suggested way to develop it.)
I think you may find that not a small number of people pay attention but as you said time is scarce and engaging with comments seems a luxury in many cases. But it does happen and I think the primary enabling factor for it to happen is the quality of the interaction. "If I spend 1-2 hours, will my input be taken into consideration (not accepted as it, just considered seriously) or will the person just react defensively and dismiss it so my time was wasted?" Productive people ask themselves these questions before spending time on something. If you assume ill intent, it destroys the relationship and prevents you from getting that valuable input that will help you improve.
See, I really liked how your proposals were made, and here I am writing comments in-between hugely busy days. :) Goes to show you're really doing something right.
Appreciate the honest feedback on how I'm trying to get things rolling. The Hive.Loans project was funded so quickly due to it effectively extending fixes to the "powerdown problem" with HIVE where it is perceived that having HIVE powered up increases your risk of holding the asset against large market movements. By figuring out the account as collateral lending schema was possible on HIVE programmatically through some code to use features within HIVE network itself it basically fell into place.
Hive Smart Chain or the HVM one is a brainchild of needing to decentralize the contracts or code running the above Hive.Loans service functionality. While still very much experimental research and proof of concept testnet building phase at the moment it should make HIVE as a utility token far more valuable than it currently is, out of the added utility of smart contract execution powered by the HIVE token. Without a way to execute smart contracts on HIVE we're basically doomed as far as I see it, making a side chain to add these features to HIVE seemed the only logical course of action. By requiring nodes to stake HIVE on the side chain to produce blocks and charging HIVE as gas fees to use the Hive Virtual Machine functionality it should drive demand plus make it viable financially to run nodes in the long run.
Assumptions are the mother of all fuckups or something along those lines, certainly am guilty of making assumptions as it's human nature for the most part but agree with you on the time / cost benefit equation that goes into making decisions a lot of the time.
Cheers captain.
I agree, they cut your funding right when things were looking up. I don't get it, I thought they were smart and wanted HIVE to thrive? Hmm, I think the HBD stabiliser is Satan!
Oh I know why this happened, because your project is a direct threat to @blocktrades business!
Just think, with @hive.loans nobody will have to sell their hive and or HBD to blocktrades any more hua? Or at least it might be an alternative to using their system. It is just good old politics as usual. This should be even more reason to get this done!
P.S. Blocktrades totally screwed me over when I used their system.
They have all the hbd and hive in the world, and they could not even be honorable with their side of the trade.
https://peakd.com/hbd/@coininstant/how-blocktrades-ripped-me-off-for-thousands-of-dollars-in-one-hbd-trade
The service wasn't meant to be a direct threat to blocktrades but if it serves that in some business sense that it basically just collateral damage of progress, not an intended effect.
You could try another swap service that supports HIVE or whatever..
simpleswap.io for example.
Also refocused on HL here tonight for dev stuff. Should be running alpha here in the next week.
Nice!!
Building an automated auditing system at the moment then need to pivot over to finishing the reverse engineering of the Hive Keychain save file creation then set up the repayment monitor and we shoouuuuld be good to start testing.
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