It is very easy to criticize DPOS and "proof-of-brain" as it were. Why is this? Because in THEORY there are a lot more glaring problems with DPOS than there are with other models. Obviously if you tell someone we are going to start voting with our money and whoever has the most money makes the rules... red flags are going to go up all over the place. Clearly, we will eventually get money attacked and then it's game over for the network.
But in PRACTICE we've already been money attacked, and that attack both worked and failed miserably at the same time. It worked in that our brand was stolen and we had to start over with marketing and whatnot, but it failed to enslave the network to a trust-fund baby. It also failed to hurt most users financially. Most users that fought against the hostile takeover made money even though we lost the war for our brand. (A brand that in my opinion wasn't that great to begin with; Hive is better than Steem).
Looking at BTC and ETH governance, what do we see? We see single points of failure all over the place with a complete breakdown in communication and consensus. Bitcoin Core is developed by an elite centralized group. Ethereum is developed by an elite centralized group with a massive premine intact.
The only way to push through changes on the top chains is to get permission from the elite and have the miners approve it and have the nodes upgrade consensus. This slows development to a snail's pace. Even though the Ethereum Foundation has a massive premine and carry a balance of billions of dollars the speed at which they are scaling the network is laughable. The same thing happened with EOS.
DAO Hack hardfork split
Ethereum didn't lose their branding, unless you consider Ethereum Classic to be the "real" chain (which it isn't because Ethereum had overwhelming consensus), but they still had to hardfork and rewrite history to prevent the DAO hack money from being stolen. DPOS might be flawed, but Ethereum still had the same problem as Steem even without the stake-based attack vector. Consensus is key.
Building up Runway
An x10 on Bitcoin or Ethereum isn't going to change anything in terms of governance or development. An x10 on Hive is going to change quite a bit of things around here. Hive's distribution of tokens is already better than the vast majority of other networks out there now that the ninjamine has been quarantined to the dev fund. When the value of Hive runs up, all of a sudden a bigger chunk of community becomes empowered by that, allowing development to proceed exponentially.
Whereas Hive opted for a governance model with obvious flaws and attack vectors, the top coins by market cap opted for ZERO governance in many respects. At the end of the day Bitcoin is a niche token who's specialty is security. Governance is an attack vector. Inflation is an attack vector. So rather than try to implement these things that could end up getting attacked, Bitcoin decided to just not have them.
This is simultaneously a feature and a bug.
Bitcoin and many other top market-cap coins chose to have nothing rather than something that would have been idealistically flawed. This is not good or bad, it's totally neutral, and it leaves a vacuum open for other projects to take those risks and to try and get them right. Hive is at the forefront of governance/reputation.
You might say Hive development is highly centralized as well. After all @blocktrades is doing a lot of heavy lifting, and we didn't even have a vote or anything to decide what our new brand was: 'Hive' was decided for us.
That may be true, but Hive scaling is not limited in the same ways that it is clearly limited on BTC/ETH. Hive development is centralized out of necessity, not because governance doesn't allow it. We are a small network, but as we scale, development we will become more decentralized in tandem with that scaling, whereas other networks will not.
The dev fund comes into play here as well. Even though it's easy to criticize the dev fund and point out how money is being wasted... it doesn't really matter how much money is getting wasted. What matters is how much total value is being generated there. We could be wasting 90% of the money on dev fund allocations, but if the remaining 10% generates x100 the value it costs, that's a net gain of x10 for the dev fund. This is a powerful tool that can only get better as we improve it and figure out what works and what doesn't.
HF25
How many people created Hardfork 25? I certainly didn't do any work on it, or did I? HF25 was everything I ever wanted out of a hardfork. So even though I didn't code any of it I was still out here writing my blog complaining about what I thought needed to be changed, and the vast majority of those changes have happened.
Does my opinion on Hive matter?
Maybe, maybe not. The point is that my opinion could matter. It is possible, whereas on the Bitcoin or Ethereum networks my opinion absolutely does not matter one bit. That is a fact.
In addition, Bitcoin/Ethereum don't have a way to communicate on-chain. That's a pretty big deal in the long run. On hive we can talk to each other on encrypted channels with the memo-key baked right into the network. I don't know when encrypted communications are going to come into play on Hive, but when they do it will be a godsend to be able to talk to each other on a public blockchain without anyone but the intended parties being able to read those messages.
Minnow Army
If you buy 1 BTC, you have zero influence on the Bitcoin network. If you buy 500 Hive, you have exponentially more influence on Hive than you would voting in any kind of real-world election. A lot of people feel like those small votes don't matter very much, and maybe they don't right now. However, as time goes by, those small votes are going to add up to a big number.
Upvotes/Downvotes
Our distribution model is also superior to most chains. Again, it's easy to criticize Hive when the abuse of the system is transparent and there are bad-actors milking the reward pool. However, again, that doesn't matter.
It does not matter if their are bad-actors on Hive. This becomes especially relevant with free downvotes as it becomes easier to route out that corruption. What actually matters though is how many good actors there are. Every time a big account upvotes a small account, that's a net victory, regardless of what anyone else does.
If every single person on the Hive network was a bad actor and only upvoted themselves or their friends via circle voting, that wouldn't lead to meltdown, it would lead to the exact same distributions we see every day in DEFI yield farming. Every upvote cast that has merit improves decentralization a little bit more than it would have otherwise. The bad actors are largely irrelevant.
Conclusion
Crypto isn't supposed to be a good solution. It just has to be good enough to work. Getting stuck on the ideals of what a network should be is a mistake, as reality will always deviate from theory, usually by a wide margin.
While it is extremely easy to criticize Hive and other DPOS networks due to the glaring attack vectors that exist in the codebase, we see that in practice it is a superior form of governance when compared to the bigger networks that seem to ignore governance issues completely and just hope it works out.
Hive is essentially a Republic 2.0. Money rules the world, and Hive, rather than shying away from that fact, leans right into it and allows the stake holders to control the network using delegations and voting in politicians directly with stake. To many, this seems like a huge flaw, and it is, but it's better than anything else the world has created, so there is that.
This essentially cuts out the middle men of traditional republics, where one must still spend an obscene amount of money to get elected. It's starting to become obvious that this is the superior form of network organization because money still controls top chains like Bitcoin and Ethereum, just in more roundabout and unfair ways that end up grinding development to a halt and slowing growth, whereas Hive has none of those issues.
There are no practical governance solutions that are better than what we have here. If they existed we would probably implement them. It's time to stop listening to people who complain without ever offering up real solutions to the problems they are pointing out. The real world is no place for idealism. Shoutout to all the builders: keep at it you're doing a great job.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
The person that forked the code, Netuoso, isn't even around anymore. He left Hive, from what I heard. The name Hive was voted on by the witnesses; the name wasn't really important at the time as getting a chain up and running before that lunatic destroyed Steem. DPOS, you vote on witnesses to act on your behalf, and if anything, the speed at which we were able to get to a new chain without centralized management or funding was amazing. Community members with low single-digit stake and far less all stepped up in various ways. So much goes into why DPOS + PoB + DAO is such a good token distribution, and we haven't even reached our final form yet.
Oh, I agree. So much going on like always on Hive.
In some years Hive will be very different and the backbone of web3 imo.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
All governance models have strengths and weaknesses, I think one HUGE benefit of Hive's is each user being able to allocate their own share of the inflation to anything they can vote on.
Many DPOS models allow stakeholder voting on big decisions, but here on Hive I can allocate my own tiny piece of the inflation each day, by using my votes.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
very true
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
cool
Steem. ;) lol
nice
Nothing is perfect, everything has its flaws, that’s just nature, even in technology, or the silicon jungle, haha. But that being said, Hive is a proven model. It makes me want to get back into full stack JS just to learn more about the code base and learn to make better tools for everyone, or at least be able to give better feedback and input on governance.
I remember sending and receiving encrypted memos on the old chain in 2017 and maybe 2018 but have no idea when or why that useful feature disappeared.
Still on the backend. Needs a little work imo.
Some frontends ignore it because it is such an advanced feature and a lot of it is spam anyway.
all good points
I'll add one more thing; whales and witnesses need to be more aggressive and decisive the next time a known bad actor makes play. @justinccp was such for the shenanigans he had already pulled. A preemptive strike was justified, but we as a community gave him the benefit of the doubt, and he strangled the life out the platform with it.
Furthermore, the sale of STEEM that had been promised to the community as a whole gave additional justification for zeroing him out.
Can we bring back the 75/25 pay out again? Could we include that in HF25?
Did you ever had a look at the "DASH DAO"? So far so longest running decentralized org in existence (~7 years).
The financial institutions is not a ground of perfection, there is always going to be a loose end how ever you try, this is why there is room for continue improvement and growth.
great post!
@tipu curate
Upvoted 👌 (Mana: 42/82) Liquid rewards.
When it comes to the branding flaw, I cringe a little bit, but with several thousand products on chain (this includes the individual brand name content creators which includes YOU and anyone else), even the name is decentralized. One viral post (much easier to achieve if at least some focus was placed on attracting consumers) or a popular game, a vibrant community; all of these things and more can attract interest in the chain and token, without even mentioning it.
Memo encryption is available on hive.pm (a #DBuzz project - in beta i think - but it works).
Having said that i just tested it and got a host error @chrisrice #bugreport
Oh yeah they work,
I'm just wondering when we will actually need them for a critical function.
totalmente
This is a good point. I believe Hive found a model that works well enough to enable its development and it's only going to get better from here
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Hive is a place if the world truly understands it
they will take it away from us.
Happy HPUD diamond hands
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
At this stage they should be allowed to do whatever they want, as long as it is not an intentional wastage. Hive is still very much an experiment, and we need to keep building and innovating to increase chances of success
Oh very good I agree
amen
As the saying goes....money makes the world go round”
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
I think many thing may be changed in many ways! The Hive's form improves the quality to make the things!
Well I think HIVE's model is quite good right now and I can't think of a crypto with a better distribution right now.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
~~~ embed:1420525264275222528 twitter metadata:SGl2ZWJ1bGx8fGh0dHBzOi8vdHdpdHRlci5jb20vSGl2ZWJ1bGwvc3RhdHVzLzE0MjA1MjUyNjQyNzUyMjI1Mjh8 ~~~
~~~ embed:1420692266298089478 twitter metadata:aWxiaXNjb218fGh0dHBzOi8vdHdpdHRlci5jb20vaWxiaXNjb20vc3RhdHVzLzE0MjA2OTIyNjYyOTgwODk0Nzh8 ~~~
The rewards earned on this comment will go directly to the person sharing the post on Twitter as long as they are registered with @poshtoken. Sign up at https://hiveposh.com.
Conviction voting, implemented in communities as https://wiki.1hive.org/ is also a good governance model.
https://1hive.org/#/home
It runs in XDai chain, an EVM architecture blockchain.
I'm also a big fan of the governance model. It is IMO very fair and based on the reputation you can build. Trust is something the internet doesn't has by nature. On hive there is some kind of it. Like the DAO for example.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
There were so many quotable parts in the post I'm gonna go ahead and bookmark this. If I make steal something from @theycallmedan
Mining Pools Are Ghetto DPoS!
You could write a solid piece comparing mining pools vs DPoS witnesses :)
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
"At the end of the day Bitcoin is a niche token who's specialty is security. " - @edicted
This was my favourite quote, however you made so many great points.