Brainstorming How to Calm the “Proof of Brain Storm” (Part 1 -- Simple Version)
First Off, Message from a Newbie: “The Hive Community is Awesome”
First and foremost, I want to say that I have been amazed by the congeniality and helpfulness of all the folks I have interacted with over the past few weeks within the Hive community.
First, @theycallmedan graciously spent time explaining Hive to my students at Oklahoma State University.
Then, @aggroed graciously sacrificed time and treasure to help me create the GRAD token and the Gradnium tribe (which will initially be used by my students at OSU, then hopefully expanded to encompass additional students and additional universities).
On multiple occasions, @themarkymark has taken time to answer my newbie technical questions. He also dialogued with me in depth last night regarding my observations and concerns about what I viewed as the pending (soon-to-be actual) POB exploit.
Throughout the day today, @proofofbrainio patiently listened and responded to each of my numerous musings about how to potentially resolve the current crisis regarding POB token distribution.
Lastly, @no-advice’s willingness to simply give back the tokens from the exploit is yet another testament to the awesomeness of the Hive community.
Simple Solution
As I mentioned in a reply to @proofofbrainio’s earlier post, I have envisioned both a simple solution and a complex solution to this crisis -- and the two are not mutually exclusive. So this post will be devoted to the ‘simple’ solution.
My initial post-exploit suggestion (to @proofofbrainio) was to temporarily switch the power-down settings to 1 day, to enable @no-advice to immediately return the excess tokens, then those tokens could be directly distributed just as if the exploit had never occurred. However, I was informed that the power-down settings cannot be temporarily changed like that, meaning that the token distribution for the next month would be dominated by @no-advice’s upvotes.
So, even though @no-advice graciously agreed to only “curate quality content and not upvote his own posts” for the next month, I do not see that as a viable solution. There are just too many ways for that to go south. No matter how carefully and artfully @no-advice goes about curating content over the next month, there will be disagreements over the choices made and those disagreements would likely end up being harmful to the Hive community and PoB tribe.
This means (imho) that a ‘restart’ of some sort is needed. At a minimum, this means abandoning the original POB token (which can heretofore be known as “POB Classic” as @rxhector coined here) and creating a new one (or two, but that needs to be the subject of yet another post).
Benefits of a ‘Restart’
First, let me say that a ‘restart’ actually creates the opportunity to correct what many viewed as a significant shortcoming of the original token-distribution mechanism. The original whitepaper envisioned a system where there would be “no tokens issued to a founder or a team” but that there would be “a 10% beneficiary percentage when posting on proofofbrain.io” that would “be used to maintain proofofbrain.io.”
On the surface, that sounded like an ideal starting point. However, many folks noticed that even with @proofofbrainio only starting with 1 initial POB token, the leverage afforded by that 1 token resulted in @proofofbrainio amassing more than 85% of the first week’s distribution of POB tokens.
So, in order to correct for the exploit and fully instantiate the “10% beneficiary” vision of the original whitepaper, I propose:
- Creating a new token (e.g. POBx)
- Distributing 72,000 POBx (the current supply) as follows:
- 7,200 to @proofofbrainio (= 10%)
- 1,800 to @no-advice (= 2.5%)
- 63,000 (= 87.5%) to everyone who participated in the initial launch of the tribe, with the tokens distributed proportional to the number of upvotes received prior to a certain cutoff date / time, such as 12:01 am, March 10, 2021 UTC (e.g. about 4 hours ago).
- As soon as the initial distribution of POBx has been made, normal voting can resume.
This is, of course, just a suggestion. I will follow-up with my ‘Complex Solution’ later; but as I mentioned previously, it is not mutually exclusive to this solution -- it merely adds another wrinkle that fixes (imho) a shortcoming that was inherent to the original POB plan.
The first week of any tribe distribution is difficult. It requires a reasonable decentralized initial stake distribution and enough content that the reward pool gets spread out.
In the case of ProoOfBrain, only 9 people had stake and like 85% of it was one person and 12% a second person, and the other 7 had the rest. There is no scenario this would work out unless they carefully voted small percentages to many unique authors.
The situation here was completely avoidable and was negligence at an extremely fragile time of the distribution process.
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The initial distribution of POB lasts 4 years. Like Bitcoin, for the first 4 years, 50 tokens will be issued every 10 minutes. The difference is it's obviously not PoW, the only way tokens enter circulation is through PoB rewards to content creators and curators.
Initially only @proofofbrainio was issued one token and staked it to begin rewarding posts with POB. Now distribution is beginning to spread out with more curators after the first payouts.
I agree that the flaw/exploit was avoidable and caused by negligence at an extremely fragile time. this was my post about it - https://www.proofofbrain.io/hive-150329/@proofofbrainio/over-32k-pob-for-one-self-voted-comment
The way Bitcoin was distributed is such that, those that start early are going to gain the most at least through the issuance. Just as it was with Bitcoin. In the first years of Bitcoin people gave away bitcoin 10,000 at a time and sometimes in exchange for lunch. There wouldn't have been a Roger Ver and Trace Mayer if they all had to buy in at 50,000 a coin.
POB is still early
For the next four years people will be able to earn well by posting better than any other time at least in Proof of Brain tokens. The next two weeks will distribute the same amount of POB as the first two weeks. People are still early.
Remember themarkymark used to sell votes. So, if you think he is totally legitamite... I guess I'd be a damned fool if I don't do the same.
It doesn't matter to me what he did. You're not seriously considering selling POB votes are you?
No. I feel I am above that.
cool, glad to hear that. I think as long as we have a culture that doesn't like vote selling it will never be a problem, especially considering the downvote feature. And it looks like we're on the same page, so that's a good start.
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STOPI appreciate your thoughts on all this. @eonwarped is helping me to distribute out the correct amounts of POB to the people that didn't receive their correct payouts because of the big payout to @no-advice. The first distribution was just made! I'm about to make a post about it. I agree that it is a precarious situation to move forward just trusting that @no-advice will do what he says, but the alternative is a restart and it seems to me that as long as the people that participated in the initial PoB distribution by commenting and posting get their tokens then everyone will be happy.
Yes, I had the thought earlier today that, as long as @no-advice limits his voting % to a very small percentage (comparable to what his voting power would've been without the excess tokens), then no one can argue with his vote choices.
Perhaps @eonwarped can provide guidance as to what those percentages should be, at each stage of the power-down, to help ensure that the excess tokens don't interfere with the remainder of the process, and perhaps @no-advice would agree to that additional constraint. That would be the cleanest solution.
I think it would be acceptable to decide on a max amount shown on the voting slider. The estimates are starting to become more accurate, and I now introduced a change in scot so that payouts algorithm takes into consideration recent votes (this won't make much sense unless you know how the hive mechanism works, where it adds to 'recent claims' the voting weight of posts that are paid out, and payouts are relative to this recent claims number * reward pool. This recent claims number decays over a period of 14 days or so, and is what allows it to adjust to active voting behavior on the chain over time. However, it is not a good setup for the bootstrap phase, and I found out while digging that the initial way pending claims worked in Hive bootstrapped by adding new votes to this recent claims up until a hard fork that stopped doing so)