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RE: Proposal to make HBD interest payable only to savings accounts

in Hive Improvement3 years ago

To me it sounds like a thing for users to do... to make statements and educate people. If anything I'm almost hoping one exchange does it so tons and tons of tweets and blogs get written to make people around the internet aware of what hive is doing.

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If the promise of high interest on a stable coin doesn't make you withdraw it to your own wallet, what does?
Users are perfectly able to ape into all kinds of farming operations. If they can't be bothered to create their own wallet for extra staking rewards, what does?

We are now trying to make life hard for the few exchanges that even bother to list HBD.

Not having to deal with HBD interest arguably makes things easier on exchanges, not harder. Now they don't have to be concerned about users claiming that the exchange is "keeping" their interest. As someone who's interacted with people who've operated exchanges, I can tell you they are generally happy to avoid such headaches.

I'm not concerned about exchanges. You obviously know much more about that topic. It was only a minor aspect in this discussion.

My main concern is, I fail to see an upside to this change. It increases complexity of Hive without offering a clear upside. I would prefer if we got rid of savings accounts.

If we can't encourage users to create a wallet and withdraw funds into it in order to hold a

  • liquid
  • stable coin
  • with interest

what are we trying to achieve here?

Savings accounts were created to enable users to hold their funds more securely, yet still maintain a near "liquid" access. 3 days is quite short: it takes me that long to move money internationally.

In practice, most people have ignored the feature, because they don't value the security that it offers enough. This isn't too surprising: look how many people hold their coins on exchanges, despite the repeated losses of customer funds experienced by exchanges over the years. Most people have a hard time factoring in the potential losses from less likely, but still possible disasters. One guy wrote a whole book on this subject, which may have been overkill, but it needed to be discussed I guess.

The proposed change should make things cognitively simpler for cryptocurrency investors: they have an expectation based on the functioning of other cryptocurrencies that they need to stake/lockup their coins to earn interest o those coins.

And as a side bonus, it will likely improve the security of user funds on Hive, by encouraging HBD holders to keep their funds in their own account and to lock their coins up for that small period of time.

I certainly agree that it is baffling how carelessly users leave large chunks of their crypto on exchanges. People seek comfort, I guess.
Why should we create a worse customer experience and include features nobody values? Those users who want to take responsibility are already doing it. Those who YOLO it will keep doing that, regardless of what we do.

I am aware why savings accounts were created. Obviously, almost nobody needs that feature. And it adds extra confusion.

Security features we have:

  • powerdown period: 13 weeks
  • account recovery: 30 days
  • withdraw from savings: 3 days.

It is a mess, inconsistent and cumbersome compared to other blockchain projects.

3 days is quite short: it takes me that long to move money internationally

Bank settlement duration has historic reasons. If we want to be compared to banks, we should be better and more convenient. Paypal can clear international settlements in no time. Of course, banks and Paypal have the ability to mitigate human error or fraud in certain cases. It is a deliberate choice with blockchains to sacrifice certain capabilities to offer more interesting solutions.

The addition of savings account is a useful feature. So is account recovery. And they were added in part to address some of the shortfalls associated with a blockchain account versus a traditional bank account.

And I don't think the times for these need to be the same. Practically speaking, I don't think it will be confusing to anyone who actually decides to make use of a savings account, that the time is different than either powerdown time or account recovery time.