An investor who can vote to release tokens from the DHF on their own, for the purpose of damaging the price, would be almost twice as large a stakeholder as blocktrades and that assumes that no other stakeholders saw the attack and would add votes to return, clearly false. For example, if blocktrades voted for return, the return vote would be 80 million, not 50 million. This attack is simply implausible to even happen, and it also makes no logical sense that someone with 50-80 million HP would want to send the price to zero.
Further someone with a stake only slightly higher than 80M could vote in all of their own witnesses.
I don't really perceive your disagreement with Matt to matter too much if I'm to be honest. I apologize for "jumping in" but It feels, at least from where I stand, that the core proposition is not being discussed. It feels as if the conversation turned philosophical and that's fine, but the post was not about the philosophy of money.
I think we all recognize that Hive is doing, has been doing, what its programmed to do. That part is clear. The code doesn't allow for things that outside its rules. What Matt is saying, and what I believe is a good amendment, so to speak, is for us to agree on a different approach as a community of stake holders. Now ideally, and I mean this sincerely, this conversation should not be happening. Someone with the right skills could jump in and do a pull request for this needed change, and granted they manage to use their political capital, get such a thing to be included in a future hard fork. That would be ideal. But the sense of emergency is now, hence this post and this conversation.
TLDR
I can agree with you and with Matt. The ideas don't oppose each other. As a matter of fact, agreeing with you on how we got here, and recognizing hive is working as it supposed to, is precisely the reason why I support us changing how we treat the DHF.
Hive’s base inflation being “programmatic” is like saying your house is technically clean because you made your bed while the rest is on fire. Sure, the code prints at a fixed curve, congratulations, but if the DHF can drop a supply nuke the moment a few voters get trigger-happy, then pretending the system is predictable is pure comedy.
Socrates would’ve pointed at this and said, “There, that’s exactly what I meant.” The guy literally built a philosophy around exposing people who think they understand something they clearly don’t. And here we are, with people parroting the word programmatic while the actual monetary expansion is basically a mood swing with a wallet attached.
Investors aren’t scared because Hive isn’t Bitcoin. They’re scared because the supply can balloon harder than a meme coin just because someone didn’t do the math before smashing “Support.” If your inflation rate can explode because two dudes got enthusiastic on a Tuesday, that’s not sound money. That’s amateur hour with a blockchain.
Putting a cap on DHF outflows isn’t some radical idea. It’s common sense. It’s what you do when you don’t want your economy to depend on whether the community collectively had a brain cell that day. And honestly, if Socrates were here, he’d probably ask the same thing I’m asking now: how can you talk about sound monetary policy when the biggest variable is human cluelessness?
There are no two voters who can approve anything. Blocktrades has 30 million votes and the next tier has about 5-6 million, and there are only a few of those. At a minimum it would take 5-6 of the largest stakeholders to unanimously (or very nearly) agree on the spending, or failing that it takes a lot of the smaller ones to agree to support it.
I'd prefer if return were a little higher (5-10 million) though, meaning the top two tiers of stakeholders still couldn't approve something even if unanimous, but that's just my opinion. If we can't get more stakeeholders to set the spending hurdle high enough, that should inform us that most stakeholders don't want a hard cap (a small one at least) either.
Yes, clear. But this still means that existing members of our community could vote to release an exorbitant amount of HBD from the DHF without realising how damaging it is to the supply. (Something we have unintentionally done IMO over the last two years). This is still not really something that is attractive to investors while there is no cap on the outflows of the DHF so that the DHF does not significantly inflate the supply of Hive in a short time, or become bigger than the market cap of Hive for example, which is now not an unreasonable next step lower.
What good reason would you argue that there should NOT be a cap on the DHF outflows?
A good reason is that there may well be situations where spending more than a fixed percentage of the market cap per year is beneficial or even necessary.
For example, consider a situation where a major rearchitecting of the code is needed to deal with a looming scaling issue or such. Now, right now Hive is getting most of its development for free, but that could stop at any time, and it might be necessary to spend a lot in a short time. Or, more conventionally, there may be marketing opportunities that, while expensive, Hive stakeholders are convinced will dramatically increase the visibility and user uptake. It may turn out that they are wrong, but it's okay to believe in something and try it, and if something like that does work out, an increase in market cap of even 20-50% (and it could be far more) can easily far more than make up for a few percent more in inflation.
I really see your approach as paternalistic in believing that your notion of how much (or more precisely how little) should be spent at any given time is better than the collective wisdom of stakeholders voting on the DHF. I don't agree with this. I also don't think that low or fixed inflation, in and of itself, is particularly valuable for an obscure blockchain that is one of thousands. Anyone who wants to bet on hard money as a key driving value proposition can find dozens or maybe hundreds of better ways to do so.
And, to be clear, I am writing this as someone who has often voted no on expenditures, in the sense that I voted for return and didn't vote for many of the passing proposals. But when I was outvoted, I accept that stakeholders disagreed with me, and I don't really know who was right.
If we want to emerge from obscurity, we have to take big risks and that can mean spending big money, not necessarily just a small percentage of market cap per year with stakeholders obsessing over their share of a shrinking pie (or melting ice cream cone might be a more apt confectionery analogy).