A lot of users get annoyed with Hive because of the 13 week powerdown schedule. Hive price can spike up but we can't sell tokens when we are 100% powered up. We'd have to wait a week to get liquid funds.
This is why LEO and other HE tokens have switched to a 4 week powerdown, which for the most part seems to work just fine. Personally I like the 13 week powerdown and think we should employ sliding scale governance so this number can be changed slowly over time, but that's a lot of work and potentially introduces bugs to the network without proper testing.
I played a lot of World of Warcraft back in the day. Thousands of hours. Seemed like a huge wait of time in a lot of respects, but surprisingly I did learn a lot about economics (in game and otherwise) during my gaming addiction years.
Role Playing Games have a mechanic called a cooldown. Some abilities are too strong and if you could use them over and over, the game mechanics would not be balanced or fair. After using an ability, it goes on cooldown and you must wait a certain amount of time before that skill becomes available again.
Rather than reduce the powerdown period from 13 weeks to 4 weeks for Hive, I've been thinking more and more about this cooldown idea. Why not just make powering down an ability like in these RPGs?
Instead of having to wait a full week to get 1/13th of our money, we could get 1/13th of our money INSTANTLY and then the ability goes on cooldown for a week. This could be an interesting way of changing Hive mechanics slightly so that users can provide some liquidity to a spiking market immediately, while still limiting a full powerdown to 12 weeks total.
Attack vectors?
@blocktrades is very much in play-it-safe mode. There are a lot of priorities for Hive and changing up the core mechanics isn't really one of them. If it's not broke: don't fix it. That's fine, I'm just throwing out ideas here.
Aside from the obvious possibility of there being bugs with the new system (even if it is pretty simple in nature), a change like this would result in an immediate 1/13 loss in stake every time an account got hacked. IMO this is an acceptable loss as 1/13th isn't that much and your account should never get hacked in the first place, but these things can happen.
There's also the issue of gaming the system by upvoting a bunch of stuff before powering down. You'd have a little bit more power on your upvotes because you wouldn't have to wait for the powerdown. Again, seems like a pretty small threat.
What do we gain?
Users feeling like they actually have access to their money. If the price of Hive spikes up they can make some liquid immediately and not get frustrated by a dip that comes before the money unlocks. This would add more liquidity to the market during periods of volatility than there would be otherwise; a big win for all parties involved.
In addition, keeping each powerdown at 1/13th of our total stack is very good for dollar cost averaging. It essentially forces users to not FOMO in or out of the market all at once. This is a big reason why I like the 13 week schedule: I feel like I shouldn't be selling more than that at one time regardless of the situation. Adding the cooldown ability makes this even better because we have access to 1/13th of our money at all times.
Just be more responsible!
There's also an argument to be made that no one should be powering up 100% of their funds to begin with. We should always have some liquid in case the price spikes and we want to sell a little. In theory, sure, but 90%+ of people in the world are bad with money, so that's just not a realistic expectation. Even I am 100% powered up because I'm in HODL mode, but it certainly would be nice if I could powerdown on demand like a skill in a video game.
Comments
What do you think?
Would you support immediate power-cooldowns?
Do the benefits outweigh the risks?
I think they do, but perhaps during the mega-bubble year is not a good time to rock the boat.