Today Hive Dev Proposal #2 #360 by mcfarhat fell below the return line.
mcfarhat has shipped real work for Hive. The problem is that Hive is around 5 cents, HBD stress signals are active and the treasury is still being asked to pay as if the economy around it did not change.
The question is affordability. A useful proposal can still be unaffordable at the wrong time.
The official DHF mechanism is simple enough. Proposal support is stake weighted. There is no negative vote, unlike the social part of Hive, that subtracts support from a proposal so if you want to stop funding you push the benchmark proposal higher.
That benchmark is Return Proposal #0.
So when powerful people say "use the return proposal" they are technically right. That is the tool we have, but describing the tool is not the same as describing the cost of using it since large holder can support a funded proposal with one vote and everyone else has to coordinate enough HP on the return proposal to climb above it.
So far that is a description, not a complaint about the rules.
blocktrades said this directly:
buy more Hive and you can vote up the return proposal
Source:
@blocktrades/re-igormuba-tgfqnh
Technically true. Socially ugly.
Buy more Hive, says the man who already has it plus a lot of proxy.
trumpman did the math: merely cancelling the proposal vote of one top account takes something like 10 to 15 million HIVE. At 5 cents that is over half a million dollars, bought into weekly all time lows, not to win anything. To tie.
At 5 cent HIVE, telling small holders to "buy more Hive" means telling them to absorb more downside in a collapsing governance token just to maybe slow down treasury spending supported by people with much larger stake. Now isn't that convenient to the big holders?
That is not a neutral answer. It is the hierarchy speaking honestly for a second.
It would take one thousand people buying $500 worth of HIVE to match the vote of blocktrades himself without accounting for proxies.
Someone considering buying HIVE to actually influence anything will just think "well, fuck, hell no, I am out".
Small holders are told to buy the bleeding asset if they want a voice. DHF receivers are paid in dollar pegged HBD, printed into their hands while the protocol refuses to print it for anyone else. During an all time low the buyer's savings bleed and the recipient's income does not. The recipient can sell that HBD into the same market the buyer is trying to hold up, or convert it into cheap HIVE and power up into the same political structure that funds them. Selling at all time lows angers people. Powering up is circle financing. Pick which one looks worse. All options look bad.
This is the two-class problem blocktrades denies existing. Not that some people have more stake, that is DPoS. The problem is that stake-weighted governance can keep stablecoin payouts moving during stress while the people absorbing the HIVE price collapse are told the remedy is to buy more HIVE, millions of dollars more, to move a threshold that does not apply to them.
And remember where the stake we are told to outbuy came from. A lot of it was minted in the early days, when inflation was enormous and self voting was the norm, at effective prices none of us will ever see again. We are invited to pay market price to catch up with money that was printed.
One more thing, and I say this as someone who wants Hive to look investable, as someone that invests but sees it as a HORRIBLE INVESTMENT. The chain prints all time lows for weeks, the largest accounts say almost nothing, and when the silence finally breaks, one of the most influential figures on Hive comes back to tell the peasants to buy more land from the crown. I do not believe our governance is corrupt. I believe it is incompetent at understanding how it looks. We truly have a PR problem. Some people can not hear themselves. And when pointed out as to "how it sounds" they say we are putting words in their mouths, some people are effectively immune to a reality check, not surprising though, that is precisely how we have got here to this point.
So again, not putting words in anyones mouths, pointing out how it looks to a reality check that will never come:
And I am not being sarcastic. I believe all I have said. I believe they are not corrupt, do not want powerful people to keep their power, do not want to circle finance and do not enjoy their backdoor.
But to an outsider reading these threads before their first HIVE purchase, looking corrupt and being corrupt closes their wallet the same way.
The next proposal above the return line is now The Hivewatchers & Spaminator Operational Proposal for the Period 2024-2026 #293.
As I write this, the return proposal needs a bit over 5 million more HP to pass it.
I have used Hivewatchers findings myself when arguing that onboarding and activity numbers cannot be trusted blindly. I value them.
Maybe most people want it funded, but if that majority exists it should vote and speak. If large holders want it funded, they should say why, as they have been funding what they want without explanations since always. All while their single votes set bars that take herculean coordination on the return proposal to match.
Visible silence is not the same as consent. Stake-weighted silence is not debate. That is the inherent flaw in our chain. Yes, it is coded into the consensus. That does not mean it has to be socially acceptable.
The return proposal is the manual brake that will take herculean levels of effort to move up and down.
My proposal is the automatic brake.
Scale DHF payouts when HBD printing is suppressed #381 is about what I consider a flaw in the governance of Hive, but it happens to coincide with the goals of people who want to defund all proposals when the HBD stress signal fires. That is a good coincidence.
The PR is here:
https://github.com/openhive-network/hive/pull/48
If hbd_print_rate is 100%, DHF payouts run normally. At 50%, half. At 0%, payouts pause and the HBD waits in the treasury.
If the argument that the DHF is not inflation because the 10% is added to it from the normal inflation, then my proposal does not cut anything if they actually stopped to think about what they were arguing. Either I am cutting HBD printing and inflation or I am not because "it is already printed". They confuse release with inflation because it is convenient.
My proposal makes the release of the DHF obey the same emergency signal the rest of the economy is already forced to notice. Why should it not anyways?
Some replies say the DHF works differently from the normal economy, so the comparison with author rewards fails, and at most we could pay proposals in HIVE instead of HBD. They are half right. The DHF is not the normal economy. It is a special mechanism with its own rules, fed by inflation, released by its own rules and accessible to nobody outside it. That special case may even be a feature. But a special case needs the checks and balances of a special case. Paying it out in HIVE changes the asset, not the absence of a brake.
andablackwidow made a fair technical objection. The DHF does not print HBD at the moment of payout the way author rewards work. It pays from an existing balance, and HBD is added to that balance through inflation over time.
That is objectively inflation. It is a token that was not circulating that gets released.
And like a creative accounting government, we do not even count that release as inflation. We should. It is expansion of the circulating monetary base, money leaving a vault and entering the economy. If a country filed its books like this, its credit rating would tank. It looks exactly like the maneuvers corrupt politicians in my country use to make up spending:
"this is too expensive, what if our accountants file this separately from our government spending?"
The protocol itself runs the same trick. Treasury HBD does not even count toward the debt ratio. It becomes debt only at the moment it is paid out and circulates (mechanics here).
since hardfork 24, HBD stored in the treasury hive.fund don't count towards the HBD debt ratio because it doesn't make sense to count them in the debt ratio as they are "locked" by another "smart contract" which prevents them to be liquidated at once (the daily outflows are capped at 1/100th of its holdings).
Now look at the full picture at print rate zero. Open any post and check the payout breakdown: 0.00 HBD. Every author on this chain is paid in HIVE because the protocol decided the debt is too high to print more. Meanwhile the treasury inflow keeps minting HBD every single block, the balance counts as nothing, and every payout converts that invisible money into the exact debt the brake exists to suppress. The treasury is the last printer still running, and it is pointed at the market.
Whoever holds enough stake decides what the treasury funds, including, if they wished, themselves. When the protocol halts HBD for everyone else, this path keeps paying Hive Backed Dollars. Those "dollars" can leave, or they can buy back HIVE at all time lows and power up into more control. Devalue the token, print the dollar, collect the stake. A genius loop.
I am not accusing anyone of running that play. The people I know in this system do not look malicious to me. But in security they do not judge a backdoor by who currently aims to exploit it. They judge it by what it allows. This one should not exist, and closing it is the whole point of the PR.
His objection, fair as it is, does not save the status quo. In the same comment he wrote:
If you wanted for
hbd_print_rateto affect that part, I could agree
Source:
@andablackwidow/re-igormuba-1781142582056
That is important. It means the serious disagreement is not whether the DHF can be tied to stress. It is where to apply some sort of lever.
Apply it to payout. Apply it to inflow. Pay proposals in HIVE when the print rate is zero. Denominate the DHF in HIVE and convert at payout time. Pick and choose the lever but I think it is universally agreed that the current system is kind of broken, isn't it?
I heard them arguing. I did not hear them saying "no, the current system works, keep it like that".
The current system is the only position nobody has really defended directly and concisely. People defend workers, stake rights, the voting mechanism, accounting distinctions, but the actual status quo is this: DHF payouts keep running while the protocol is already saying HBD conditions are stressed everywhere else.
That deserves a direct defense, not a dodge.
And honestly it is a hard position to defend because if we got to where we are something is not working. In a failing system defending the status quo is socially looked down on. Not that it matters when you hold the majority of the active stake. Not the absolute majority, just the majority, the active stake, that matters for effective control.
blocktrades framed my change as taking rights away from large holders.
I reject that framing.
My PR removes no vote from anyone. A whale keeps the same proposal votes. A small holder keeps the same proposal votes. The voting system remains stake weighted. The only thing that changes is the payout rule under HBD stress.
If large holders paid for rights they also paid for responsibility. Rights without responsibility is the flaw in our DPoS. Stake is supposed to be locked skin in the game, and during economic collapse and financial stress a steady stablecoin income on the side is an escape hatch from exactly that.
Worse, you cannot claim the moral right to direct treasury spending and then act offended when people judge the consequences of that spending. We will judge you. We are justly pissed. We are exactly where Justin Sun's Steem is in terms of market cap. We are fucked and you say we need more HIVE to unfuck ourselves.
I am sorry but I am a casual user and a small stake holder, am I allowed to express my emotions? Do I have to be rational and composed all the time? No? Ok:
You have fucked us and instead of a cigarette after sex you asked us to cook dinner.
Oh, and since we are worried about disenfranchisement, let us count who actually got disenfranchised. Weekly all time lows are disenfranchisement at scale, executed slowly. For years the logic was "we cannot afford to upset holder with millions of HP", and every time that logic won, a few holders with 1,000 or so HP quietly left. Nobody filed those exits under losses. That is survivorship bias as accounting policy: the retained whales are counted, the bled out thousands are not.
Add those exits up over the years and you get millions of HP gone, thousands of users gone, a supply that largely sits idle on exchanges, and a governance where the remaining stake is stronger than ever precisely because everyone else gave up. Survivorship bias. "But the large holders want this, you can organize yourselves and vote for what you want" no we can not. You made sure that everyone who agreed with us sold and left.
So yes, my PR risks disappointing one person with 10 million HP. The status quo already disappointed ten thousand people with 1,000 HP each. Only one of those numbers ever gets defended in the comments by the "important people" and that is understandable.
Stake weighted governance is not a shield from criticism. It is the reason criticism has to be sharper, and that may feel unfair. No one wants to see themselves as the villain. You and I both want to lay our heads down at night and think: someone disagrees with me but I am doing the best I can from where I stand and with the limitations I have.
However, a small account can be wrong and almost nothing happens. A large account can be wrong and we crash. I can be emotional, I can not post for 1 month and come back and say something that sounds bad to investors, I don't have a voice. Some people with a voice though either stay silent for 1 month or longer and then come back saying words uncarefully, not thinking how they may sound. Think about what your silence sounds like and also think about what your words sound like.
There is a fairness argument for recipients and I take it seriously. People commit to work, they plan around funding and suddenly an onchain stress signal cuts them off. That is brutal.
But that brutality already exists.
Proposal funding can disappear whenever votes move. What happened to #360 is the current system working exactly as designed: binary, social, political and adversarial. Funded yesterday, unfunded today.
My PR makes the cut proportional and predictable. It is unreasonable to expect the whole of Hive to mobilise to defund things in the middle of a crisis. That is too convenient for the status quo: "just get together, buy more HIVE and defund". No. Bake the brake into the code. The stress signal already exists. Demanding mass mobilisation during a crisis structurally favors the few and powerful, because a crisis means users left, and the big holders are at their strongest exactly now, surrounded by accounts and HP abandoned by people they disenchanted. How can you even expect us to mobilise? To buy up and compete? We can't and you expect we will not realize that.
At 100 print rate, full payout. At 50, half payout. At zero, pause. The rule is public before the crisis. It applies to everyone. It does not require naming enemies. It does not require a week of posts, pressure, accusations and counter-accusations.
If I were a funded team, I would rather face a formula than a crowd with pitchforks.
We do not want a future where doing our worst crisis the answer is effectively asking people to gather up and pick up a pitchfork. That is uncivilized and unreasonable and tiring if cyclical. We should strive to be better than that.
The return proposal is the pitchfork, because it is the only tool the protocol gives normal users today, and the normal users are arming themselves.
Proposal #381 is an attempt to replace the pitchfork with a circuit breaker, for a more civilized and predictable Hive future.
Vote for Return Proposal #0 if you think Hive needs to raise the funding bar during this crisis. Sadly we don't have a circuit breaker, we must use our pitchfork.
Support proposal #381 if you think DHF payouts should scale with HBD stress. So in the future we won't need pitchforks and it will all be algorithmically predictable, we will be able to focus on other things rather than mobilizing to defund proposals one by one ourselves.
If you are a dev, review the PR or write a better version. I already said mine lacks tests and that I am not a core developer. If the mechanism is wrong, improve the mechanism.
If you are a witness or a large holder, state a position. Not vaguely. Directly. And write it as if someone considering their first HIVE purchase will read it, because they will.
Should DHF payouts continue normally when hbd_print_rate is suppressed?
Should the only brake be mass coordination around the return proposal?
Maybe your answer is yes. If so, say yes and defend it.
But do not tell small holders to buy more HIVE while you are at your strongest and HIVE is looking the worst. A lot of people fled Hive. Do not pretend it is easier for us to position ourselves now because it is cheaper, quite the opposite. We buy HIVE with income from outside of Hive, and fewer people means less outside income flowing in. Maybe you do not see it or maybe you hoped nobody would point it out but here we are, a crisis makes the large stakeholders stronger. You say things that scare away investors. You transpire the power that you have.
That is the part people feel but often do not say.
The line moved once. Raise it again.
