So I was listening to @theycallmedan the other day and he was talking about inflation. Playing devil's advocate on both sides (not really) about whether or not we should drastically reduce inflation on Hive in order to tighten our economic policy and stem the bleeding on this selling pressure.
Funny how that works, even when the price of Hive isn't even going down, just because Bitcoin/ETH/LTC are going up everyone is flipping their damn shit and trying to justify these ridiculous maneuvers as if they are going to help the price.
Dan comes to the obvious conclusion (that it's a bad idea), but at first I was confused about the conversation, why are we talking about this again? Then I saw this little gem:
https://leofinance.io/@aggroed/hive-inflation-reduction-thoughts-on-the-next-hard-fork
Oh what do we have here? A "top witness" talking about how we should reduce our overall inflation from 8% to 1%? Cool story, bro! That's sure to work!
Tell me, would you bet your life on it?
Would you bet your life on the "FACT" that lowing Hive inflation so drastically is going to make the token price go up? Because guess what? It's not. Stop talking.
Ultimate backfire recipe:
I think we should bring it to 1% per year and hold it there. .33% for witnesses, .33% for DAO, and .33% for post rewards.
Conflict of interest? How do you mean?
Oh okay I see... we shouldn't lower inflation for the witnesses or the dev fund, just for everyone else. Again, stop talking.
I can tell you've really done the math on this.
Hm, let's see... if we cut inflation from 8% to 1%, my vote power loses 87.5%... but wait... there's more! Because instead of 65% of inflation going to the reward pool that gets cut in half to 33%. So now my vote get's reduced by 93.75%. And there is no mention of the 15% we are giving to stake holders as APR. Again, I can tell you really thought this through.
Trying to nerf my 80 cent upvote to 5 cents? Get fucked? How about that instead?
What was the point of hardcoding the inflation schedule into the protocol if so many top level authorities would so blatantly disregard that whitepaper promise without even so much as a community vote?
I repeat:
One of the biggest founders of PEACE ABUNDANCE LIBERTY wants to cut abundance by 90%+, just as long as the witnesses don't lose their cut. Seriously, get fucked... how much more of a fool of yourself can you make? Stop running HiveEngine on a god damn toaster that crashes when you don't pay the renewal fees for steem-engine.com.
Scotbot: the little engine that couldn't.
Sad.
See this?
This is a visual representation of the Butterfly-Effect and Chaos Theory. Change a single variable and the entire system has a completely different outcome. To casually throw out the idea that drastically reducing inflation is the answer to all our problems is foolish and naïve. Coming from someone of such a high position of power makes it dangerous and a disgusting conflict of interest to the community.
No vote; no discussion; let's just do it.
How could it possibly backfire?
Hm, let's see... if you reduce my upvote from 80 cents to 5 cents, I'm going to power down all my stake for starters.
Inflation is amazing.
Inflation promotes growth and increases money velocity and volume. To make the claim that inflation is a problem is to claim that the people in control of that inflation are the problem (this is why fiat currency is shit). "Stakeholders shouldn't control inflation, because witnesses and upvoted devs are more trustworthy"? Please. Get real.
Even if it was a good idea to lower Hive inflation, now would be the absolute worst time to do it. We have suffered multiple crippling defeats. We have airdropped millions of tokens to users who are looking to exit. We have been dealing with a negative feedback loop for 3 years, and right after we've paid all our dues somehow it's a good idea to change things up right when that negative feedback loop is about to flip? NO.
Because when the price starts going up... what happens? Upvotes increase... and then people want to power up... and then there's a liquidity crisis and the price bubbles. Take away inflation... no more feedback loop. If you want to take it away you take it away at the top of the bull market, not at the bottom of the bear market.
Never let a good crisis go to waste.
Fear is being used in an attempt to centralize the power of this network.
"Don't worry, we'll protect you. We can wield this power better than you can wield your own freedom."
The irony is that the same libertarian anarchist antigovernmental characters on this platform are the ones trying to pull the standard moves out of the imperialist playbook. Good thing we're on a transparent network, eh?
Broken Record
https://peakd.com/hive-167922/@edicted/bitcoin-is-the-stablecoin-we-need-to-print-more-inflation
I hate saying the same shit over and over again... but really... why does everyone just talk about how they are going to fix everything by turning a few nobs on this play pen? How about you go out and build something of actual value instead of trying to juke the system we have? THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH IT. LEAVE IT ALONE AND BE PATIENT.
If it were up to me I would INCREASE inflation on Hive to 10% indefinitely. Even if Hive got devalued by 10% every year due to the 10% inflation... it wouldn't matter. Why? Because most of that inflation is "devaluing" the stake of the people who control it. Ergo, nothing is being devalued at all. Would you rather have 100 coins worth $2 each, or 200 coins worth $1 each? Who gives a shit how many arbitrary units you have? Get over the BS unit-bias already.
And of course, Hive would not get devalued by 10% every year, because that inflation creates growth and increases money velocity and promotes decentralizion and yada yada yada. Inflation is awesome. Too many Bitcoin maximalist ideas are out there hiding the truth of the matter. It's not about reducing inflation, it's about who controls it and the trustworthiness of their character. By continuing to allow all stake holders to wield quite a bit of inflation we get a nice spread.
Conclusion
It's not very professional to go on such a tirade... but if I was being paid for being nice and proper I'd of made $0 so far me thinks. It's one thing for random users to come forward thinking we need to reduce inflation, but when it comes from top brass looking to funnel it directly into their own pockets that's another matter entirely.
You know what I have never seen, ever? A top witness saying we should lower witness inflation or increase the number of consensus witnesses. What a novel concept. I wonder why no one's ever thought of it before. Not saying its a good idea, just that these other flagrant power plays are transparent and offensive.
Put your money where your mouth is.
If you're so sure that lowering inflation is a guaranteed path to the moon, then why are you making sure that witnesses are also getting paid more than x3 more? Like... seriously.
No one wants to take responsibility for getting dumped. If you want to blame someone for Hive price action: blame yourself. I do it all the time. I've been here three years and I feel like I easily could have brought enough value to this network to justify a top 20 ranking on the witness list. Alas, here I am... zero dapps in. Too bad, so sad. Get over it.
Perhaps rather than create some pump/dump shit-token we should be more focused on burning the network's HBD debt to generate value. Or perhaps we'll just carry on hiding behind this illusion of abundance mindset when our actions clearly point to one of scarcity. Fake it till you make it, amirite?
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Reducing the value to the users will certainly backfire. Seems like a good way to push people away from the platform just as we are trying hard to bring in new users.
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broken double clicking mouse strikes again! lol
Hahaha... that's ok. You can double click upvotes on me any day! I'd be really happy if @onealfa made that mistake on one of my posts about once a day or so.
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I was going to reply similarly to aggroed's post, but I didn't because (1) I end up spending WAY too long writing replies to that kind of stuff and then replying to all the replies on my reply and (2) it's not gonna happen anyway.
One thing that I don't think most people realize is that the "top" witnesses really don't have much power or control over the network at all. It's all in the hands of the stakeholders, which is how it should be. We pretty much can't do anything without the approval of the stakeholders who vote for us.
Even if we did some surprise hard fork or anything like that it would certainly cause a bunch of issues for a short while but ultimately the stakeholders would vote in new witnesses on the original fork (assuming they didn't agree with the changes) and things would go back to normal and the top witnesses who forked would be on their own new chain that's not Hive anymore.
So the only way any changes like this - or anything else - will happen is if the majority of the stake votes for it.
In any case, I 100% agree with you about inflation. The problem with the HIVE token price has nothing to do with any of the variables or properties of the network, it's that not many people want HIVE. That's not going to change no matter how much we jigger inflation or curation curves or any of that stuff.
We need to get people to want HIVE. If people want HIVE then more inflation is good (to a point). If people want HIVE, and staking HIVE gets you more HIVE (via inflation), then people will want HIVE even more so they can get more inflation. If something can kick-start that process then it can create a positive feedback loop.
I think what most people realize is that a very large chunk of the stake is owned by the top witnesses. The reason for this is two-fold: 1) many of them took part in mining in the very early days and 2) if you have acquired a large stake, it makes sense to set up a witness of your own and use your stake to move it up the list so as to earn witness rewards.
Now, this is normal and acceptable as witnesses must be paid well for the sake of network security. But here's where the Achilles' heel of DPoS lies: the list of consensus witnesses is short, which leads to stake centralization over time - without additional major sources of inflation such as content rewards. The push to do away with content rewards one way or another is a very transparently self-serving move, which must be a major reason why the price hasn't been going anywhere but down in the last three years.
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At the same time, from a political standpoint, it doesn't matter if a top witness could make something like this happen or not... even if people THINK it could happen it tarnishes our credibility.
It would be like if someone from the Bitcoin community suggested we go back to 50 BTC block rewards except it was perceived that this person actually had the power to make it happen. It's hard to even imagine that scenario because it is so far removed from reality... while here on Hive something like that could easily happen, and everyone knows it.
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Yea, exactly...your post kind of made it sound like this could happen all of a sudden without any kind of stakeholder approval, so I just wanted to point out that that's not the case.
People misunderstand this about DPOS all the time. They think that this small group of people can pretty much do whatever they want, but really that's not the case and it's all based on stake-weighted voting.
Can we get the 20 hive poor tax taken off small votes?
Here's a reply to respond to! :D
Yeah I agree, I didn't like the idea of cutting it. Edicted here put the numbers into sobering perspective and it will just shatter what we have going, I think. In order to get more people we need to do what they are attracted to. Splinterlands and other games is a huge draw so I think that's where more focus should be. I think there's already decent focus on it now but once you draw people in they end up seeing all else that goes on, transaction-fee free might we add!
Demand is the engine of a vibrant economy. The rest is window dressing.
Which raises the most important question - and no window dressing - why, after 4 years or so - has demand not emerged...
Exactly.
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I was thinking about that the entire time I wrote it :D...
Such rudeness over such trifles on my part.
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"You know what I have never seen, ever? A top witness saying we should lower witness inflation or increase the number of consensus witnesses."
^ This!
Always an entertaining read
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RABBLE!
Here's some inflation for you ^
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So let me see if I understand you correctly since it was a bit unclear in the post:
You are against decreasing the inflation rate?
Would you please tell us how you really feel?
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I could feel he was a tad upset but I might be wrong on this one :)
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#triggered
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It would be good if he wasn't so shy so we could find out what he really thinks. lol.
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Y call this post "shy"? Interesting.
I was being sarcastic.
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Do not vex me, wizard.
happy new year, matey!
We've been through this debate so many times, which is why I am on the side of cutting it, just get it done, if it doesn't work then at least we can say it doesn't work, but just debating it all the time is tiring. If it breaks the network so be it, who cares? If the remaining user base feels they want to jump to sister projects (of which mot of the smaller users already do) then so be it.
This isn't Bitcoin, so for me I don't care all that much about how inflation and distribution works, I have Bitcoin for that, HIVE is just fun for me, so I am more open to experimenting and putting debates to rest.
Also scotty bot has allowed for over-tokenisation without much liquidity or demand, so if the HIVE inflation change goes in I assume the masses all go focus on chasing those tokens, which is great for say LEO so I kinda hope its win regardless
I don't know, just reall over this debate, get it over with
The problem with lowering inflation is that it takes all the uniqueness of Hive... the ability to network on a social media platform... and turns it into a useless pile of garbage that doesn't do anything. Like I said before, if we want to reduce inflation... we do it in a year in the middle of the bull market... not leverage a bunch of unfounded fear to give the witnesses and top brass more power. Just my 2 cents on the issue.
I agree 100% on this. It's stupid. There's no evidence it will do anything. The USD value has held steady. No reason for it.
It's ridiculous if it doesn't affect the witnesses or DAO either. Greedy bullshit is what it comes down to then. They want a higher coin price at no cost to themselves so they can reap the benefits of it while all us small guys get screwed.
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Increasing the consensus witness number beyond 20 has seemed like a necessity for a long time, that or lowering the total number of votes per account. Neither of which seem to come up...
While we are on the subject, I actually think the inflation is too high as well, though his suggestion of making all pools equal is pretty offensive. Everyone takes a cut in absolute terms, but in percentage of the pool terms, it's the reward pool/investors that really bear the brunt. Don't even get me started on the DAO...
The price will spike way higher during the bull run if inflation is high. Bigger upvotes create crazy FOMO and overbuying. Less inflation, less volatility. Good during the bear market but bad during the bull market.
Regardless, it's a mistake to think that less inflation equals a higher market cap. The cap is dependent on a multitude of other factors. Personally I think correctly allocated high inflation will lead to a much higher cap than not, but that's obviously very arguable.
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Can we get the 20 hive poor tax taken off small votes?
The dao has plenty of funds, iyam.
Yep, that was a terrible idea from day one. You work too hard at preventing abuse and you turn new users away.
I think the main idea was to increase the take at the top by stopping the take at the bottom.
Greedy bastards, lied to us about it, too.
Iyam.
Still can't get that stinc out of the air, not all the foulness has left.
Too many me's, and not enough us's.
It wasn't stinc that pushed that change through...
Was it the people that did follow stinc suggestions?
Please someone make a proposal for a hive marketing campaign(Ads), let's test to see if it brings results.
In a company the most important part is marketing and sales.
I look at aggy's post and comments and I'm just wondering who is looking at the inflation rate of a social media and gaming blockchain and using that and that alone as their metric to buy in.
Our problems are more about user onboarding and retention than inflation, no?
This. Deflation inflation is pointless talk. If we can't find demand for a censorship resistant blogging platform so be it. It's a niche product
It is how we treat people when they get here that is the problem.
The 20 hive poor tax insures that they quickly call bs on this place, just as the ones that implemented it desired, it increases their rake to chase off the newbs.
Reducing inflation isn't going to get more users in actually wanting to buy Hive or other H-E tokens for that matter.
Creating a demand for the token is where it's at but why would anyone outside this chain want to buy Hive if they haven't heard of it?
I don't think saying "we're going to cut inflation" is going to attract buy pressure - people will be like "wtf you on about?" What it will do is piss off what's left of those who have stuck around through thick and thin and they'll just power down and leave as you insinuated.
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I've seen thefakewolf call for similar measures multiple times, so he's not alone up there on the witness list of people wanting to screw with inflation. I'd like to know who else up there has these designs, so I can be sure they don't have my vote.
Removing author and curation rewards would make Hive a useless and dead chain and further cement stake into the hands of the elite consisting mostly of consensus witnesses.
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Noone takes a-greed seriously these days. He's too busy farming and cloning games anyway.
Maybe he'll come with an idea to set the powerdown to 2 years. That might help as well.
Give me one reason to hold my hive except for speculation purposes.
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Buy at 7-8 cents in a couple months :D
The only reason to hold any crypto is speculation at this point.
I speculate that the shitty inefficient database that is Bitcoin is more trustworthy than fiat.
It's a much easier pitch when I put it this way though:
Are you willing to invest in other projects on Hive like LEO or 3Speak?
Are you willing to invest in people on Hive like @blocktrades, @theycallmedan, and @khaleelkazi?
If so, holding stake on Hive is a no-brainer.
I invest in Hive because it's an investment in myself and all these other people doing good work.
They can't all be winners, but I'm still pretty confident about my Hive investments.
I'm already in a phase where I'm just collecting rewards, interests, and airdrops.
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This is a team effort of mostly individual anarchists?
Seems like it, most days.
Geez .... why so serious :)
All valid points thpugh.
HBD needs some tweaking ..... waiting for another post from you on that. I know you did it before, but now again.
Finally got Triggered by the thousandth person to assume that lowering inflation fixes all problems without any thought behind it.
Since you put so many quotes on your postz here's another one from Michael jackson: they don't really care about us...
I also get why they're talking bad of leofinance. It's because they're not in control.
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yep with LEO was launched the old-guard on Hive went full Hive maximalist... then when LEO goes x10 and Hive dips they get mad... OOPS!
Straight to the point, @edicted.
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I must confess I agree with you and I don't think that almost nullifying the rewards will solve the problems. Or it might generate new ones. I am keen to see what this happens and hopefully they will think on how to grow the platform and not how to freeze it.
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It's a simple thing, if they want to reduce the inflation, it should generally affect everyone including the witness I think that's when it'll be perceived as a bad idea. Inflation keeps this place going. How are we so sure taking or reducing to 1% will do anything huge for hive? It's just s theory that's not proven, asides it's a bad idea.
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Yeah, agree.
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btw.. this comment section... out of control.
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HBD is here to prevent 30 million dollar hive pizza buys, anything you can do to keep these fools from ending HBD is good in my book.
Maybe you should redo that idea you had about increasing demand for it?