This is definitely a worthwhile conversation, and something I've been thinking about myself for a while.
In a perfect world, we'd all make enough in passive income HBD & HP interest etc) to create a UBI. But of course it's not a perfect world. Key issues are that subsistence level for a UBI varies hugely from country to country, and that it takes a huge amount of time to build (say) HBD interest up to the point of being a decent % of what you need to survive.
The current SBI system is nice, but isn't a UBI because it takes so long to build a decent stake and is mostly used as a slow-burn long term reward tool, so doesn't help the new users we're trying to retain.
I have an idea for a solution, but it's not going to be popular in some corners of Hive !
Basically, it looks something like this, although all the exact numbers would be up for discussion.
For the first two years of an account's existence, author rewards would be doubled, and curation rewards would have a "hard floor" of 2 cents vote value on post upvotes down to 50% vote power, as well as vote value being quadrupled for comment upvotes.
These modifiers would all be on a very slow reducing rate, finally reaching zero after two years. Thus, after one year, author rewards would have reduced to be at 1.5x standard.
There would be some kind of "clawback" mechanism in the form of a (similarly declining) fee to pay if you power down or extract HBD interest during that time.
What this would help to achieve is enabling new users to grow their account quite rapidly at first, with the slowly declining bonuses leading to a tapering effect (hopefully countered by account growth) rather than a sharp cut-off. It also has a mechanism to reduce farming for extraction.
How it would be funded (this is the controversial bit) - I feel that the DHF should be converted to a loan basis rather than a grant. Each proposal should submit a business case including detailed financials. Only core code upgrades would qualify for a grant, or perhaps only those which aren't monetised in any other way. It's a pet peeve of mine, admittedly, but I hate seeing proposals asking for lots of HBD when they then go on to charge any kind of fee to users.
The one problem I can see with this idea is how we'd stop existing users creating a new account to get the bonus, then transferring their old account HIVE and HBD into it. But I'm sure some kind of mechanism could be adopted (maybe having an HP & HBD threshold at which the bonuses cease to apply, either based on account value or just on inbound transfers).
Aaaand... I've written an essay. Sorry !
This is the kind of crazy thinking/brainstorming I want to read about. It's the only way ideas get sharp, by allowing them to collide against realities.
Can you think such a thing could be implemented on a layer 2 protocol?
Thanks for the quick reply ! I must admit I think in business terms rather than being technically competent when it comes to coding. My guess is that it might be easier to code on layer 2 - after all, we've got Hive Engine already.
But if it's on Hive Engine things we'd need to think about are anti-extraction mechanisms that still help people to build their actual HIVE (and the anti-extraction still works), and we'd still need to find a way to fund it and keep the price of the token used stable or pegged to HIVE. Tribe tokens are notorious for losing value !
The additional issue of doing it on layer 2 is that it adds complexity, and I think unnecessary over-complexity combined with poor information provision is a key driver in pushing new users away.
Layer 2 tokens are a difficult puzzle, but they are also a lot easier to deploy. They don't need consensus from the whole chain.
Soon (I hope), I'm going to be hosting a podcast with some Hivens that have solved tokenomics on top of Hive. It's the bricks one would need to then implement anything else on top of.
Back in 2017 whales needed to grow the community to make their mined stakes financially valuable, so they upvoted n00bs they noticed for a couple weeks. When there were suddenly >1M new accounts they realized their ability to maintain a majority of stake was impossible with that level of distribution, and HW began DV'ing accounts to their breaking point, gradually and suddenly reducing users to that level the oligarchy found optimal. That's where we are today, with ~3-5k users on Hive.
Because Pharsesim and the oligarchy maintain a majority of stake, they maintain control of the witnesses, and that maintains control of the code, and that maintains their ability to secure the majority of rewards and of stake. So einfach is das.
Thanks!