So "draining" was a bad choice of words, because my intent wasn't focused on the funding. I understand the purpose of @hbdstabilizer and it isn't draining money from the DHF, my intent was more about draining the potential of the DHF, the opportunity cost. The argument could be made that having more money in the DHF would raise the potential, but we can't assume these Korean pumps will last forever, they never do. And a retrace can eat away all the potential gains made by selling HBD for HIVE, leaving us right where we started without the added benefit of many of the things that could have been.
I understand the potential for upside on this, but you can't deny any risk as well. If HIVE retraces back, then we'll be looking at trying to get the HBD peg back up, and worse off than when we started.
I don't agree it leaves anything where it started, because even if the prices go right back down to where they were, there is less HIVE in circulation. That makes it more viable long term, because it leaves the market in a state where, all else being equal, it is more able to absorb future selling (and there is simply less HIVE out there to sell).
Of course, price and demand for HIVE may crash at some point in the future, making things challenging, but they may anyway. Having less HIVE in circulation if and when that does happen only makes matters better, not worse.
This right here is what I'm talking about. I understand supply/demand. I get that restricting supply causes price increases. But it's not a long term solution. The DHF is there to build the things that bring in sustainable demand for the token, and those being removed are what I'm taking issue with.
It's not a problem today, and it won't be a problem if this lasts a week. But sooner or later, this will have unforeseen consequences in the long term, something that merely restricting supply can't fix.
Also I would like to add I'm not taking issue with you. You see a problem, and you're taking the initiative to tackle that problem. I'm merely preaching to the stakeholders, hoping to either provide some perspective, or learn something myself.
I'm the primary stakeholder involved in the loss of funding for proposals right now. And I do place a high value on developers, as should be obvious from how many proposals I'm normally voting for. You're not telling me anything I don't already know about the importance of development to the long term future of the chain (and I'm not even mostly talking about price, since I'm more interested in improving what is, than what it's worth).
Right, I can propose all i want and if other stakeholders don't vote for it, nothing happens.
I agree on that point. It's a trade off. It depends on the relative merits, and that's both a question of judgement and numbers. At some level of financial ROI and supply reduction it probably doesn't make sense to interrupt projects at all. At some level it does. Those levels are subjective.
FWIW, I haven't unvoted anything (but I considered it). I was actually against interruption at lower HBD price levels (which mean lower immediate ROI) and thought the stabilizer should just use left over budget. At the higher levels, I'm more open to it, but not out there pushing it either.
The network already provides a mechanism for this, and while the haircut rule puts a wrench in that if HIVE goes too low, a revision to that is hopefully coming too.
The network provides a mechanism for HBD conversions, but the DHF could be underfunded (relative to now) if HIVE reaches its 8 cent lows again. It's a worst case scenario, I know, but that's the risk I'm referring to.
All the economics argue against that scenario. The stabilizer actually acts to increase the price of Hive, via it's buying activity. Even in the worse case, where every proposal that was paying out and is now not, decided to stop working until they got funded again (an unreasonable position to take, IMO, since they've been benefiting from the 1.3 to 1.5 price advantage of HBD for a while now), I just don't see that the value they provide can match that of the hdbstablizer. If that were true, then we should never have put any daily budget limit on the DHF, and we should be spending 10x or more than we're spending now. Because the ROI for the DHF is truly insane at the moment. Personally, I think it would even make sense for my team to stop development temporarily, despite it being the core, if that would have focused more money to the stabilizer. This isn't an issue, since we're not drawing any funds from the DHF now, but that's just to indicate how huge the value to the chain that's being delivered by the stabilizer right now.
My main issue is this isn't marketable. I care about the price of HIVE, but what I care more about is getting people here using the chain. I think having that as the main focus will make the price rise regardless. Raising the price of HIVE without getting more people on the network will always be temporary. Even attracting more users by raising the price of HIVE would only be marginally effective if our past retention rates are anything to go by. We have an underlying problem that can only be fixed with more diversity of features and opportunity i.e. documentation, public infrastructure, and dev work.
The DHF isn't perfect, and even with careful review and intelligent management, they're not all going to be winners. The way I see it, it's more of a shotgun approach; targeting a certain area with enough bullets to hopefully get a hit. Following that analogy, right now we've stopped taking shots, and are filling the ammo box hoping it doesn't go foul before we can use it.
There's nothing terribly wrong in theory with what you said, other than missing the sheer magnitude of the return ratio associated with the stabilizer right now. The returns from the stabilizer will let us do far more later and a short term suspension of funding for proposals won't do much harm, by my calculations. I've weighed out the alternatives, and I'm quite certain this is the correct course of action as a temporary measure.
Of course, others can disagree and vote as they will. You'll note that several proposals are still voted in by other people, even though I think it's a mistake to have them voted in right now. I have a lot of influence due to my stake, but it's not overwhelming by any means, clearly.
As a side note, I'm wary of using analogies too freely, because they often lead to mistakes in thinking when the two systems are not completely analogous. Developers and software development for the most part function quite differently from an ammo box and a gun. In other words, I see no likelihood of the fouling you reference.
Analogies can have their uses when first communicating the functioning of a new system to people unfamiliar with the system, but continued use after that just leads to improper conclusions due to the increasing chance of model mismatches, IMO. For example, whenever I hear a business guy start using sports analogies to promote his ideas instead of presenting a business-based analysis, I start to question how well he knows how businesses function.
The fouling is in regards to a bear market. If BTC tanks, of which there's a non-zero chance, then HIVE could very well be back in the $0.12 range again. I'm not saying that it's likely, or making wild predictions, all I'm saying is looking at the chart right now is not indicative of all possibilities. And if, and this is a big if, HIVE reaches $0.12 again, then even a 3:1 average trade of HIVE:HBD would be a huge net loss.
To be clear, I think stabilizing HBD is a worthy goal, and the DHF has room for funding it. But there's risk and also trust involved. Having a decent peg would provide a lot of trust for merchants to use the currency, but the long history has shown that HBD is unreliable for anyone thinking of using it for their business. This project isn't going to go far to build that trust back, even if it works flawlessly. It can however provide data to contribute to a programmatic solution, and that's where I really see the value.
Putting all eggs in this basket has some obvious upside, but that's all it's marketed as is upside, without the slightest hint of a potential downside. There's a good chance that I don't understand the inner workings of the DHF's HIVE to HBD conversions in the background, and that even if HIVE goes to 12 cents we can still come out ahead on this deal. If I'm way off, I would appreciate being corrected, even without going into details.
With all that said, your other point you made elsewhere about projects being overfunded for a short while hasn't gone on deaf ears. The funding has been paying out ~2X the amount they were asking for, so a short break isn't going to hurt anything. My intention with this post and conversation is mainly informing people before it hurts anything, rather than waiting til it gets to that point.
The haircut mechanism was established to mitigate the risk of an excess amount of HBD created during a bull market resulting in severe dilution. Despite it's negative impacts, I think it serves that purpose fairly well.