HF Proposal: Vote to Reduce Power Down Period to 4 Weeks

in #steemdao5 years ago (edited)


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Please note there are now two proposals issued to enable the community to either vote IN FAVOUR or AGAINST the idea of a 4 week Power Down period reduction.

Vote this proposal if you are "IN FAVOUR" of reducing the Power Down period to 4 weeks.

Voting platforms:

https://steemitwallet.com/proposals
https://steempeak.com/proposals
https://steemproposals.com/proposal/53

If you are "AGAINST" the 4 week Power Down change then visit the COUNTER PROPOSAL


Be sure to read discussions on both proposal posts in order to make an informed decision and feel free to contribute towards the discussion.

Check the latest Steemitblog post for additional discussion.


Excerpt from Original proposal

This is a consensus proposal to allow witnesses and stakeholders to vote on this change being implemented in the next HF, thereby recording their approval on-chain.

The proposed change is to reduce the current 13-week power down schedule to 4 weeks. The reason for selecting 4 weeks was to still provide some lockup protection within the 30-day account recovery period.

There was talk about having different power down schedules for earned vs invested SP but that would be a much more complex code change and additional cognitive load for the user, therefore this proposal is simply for a reduction to 4 weeks and nothing else.

The changes will likely involve code to first halt all current power downs in progress and change the parameter from 13 to 4 weeks.

The premise behind this change is to reduce the barrier to entry for investment into Steem and PoB SMT's, currently it is daunting for investors to lock-up their capital for 13 weeks. While 4 weeks is still high compared to other chains like EOS, it is a positive incremental iteration in the right direction, with low risk of market sell-off. It can be further reduced in a future hardfork if proven to not have adverse market effects.

Implementation: This is likely a small code change that can be done by Steemit Inc., community developers are of course entitled to submit PR's to the public repo for these changes or submit a proposal to be remunerated for the same.

There was also a discussion about adding an instant power down by burning 5-10% of the stake, that may be more expensive to code and perhaps should not be considered for this HF, but if still desired should be voted on via a separate proposal. (EDIT: This has been found to be very dangerous, a hacked account could be instantly drained via this burn mechanism and therefor circumvents any lockup period safety benefits.)

Please can all top 20 witnesses who support this change kindly vote FOR or AGAINST. Backup witnesses, active stakeholders and community members are invited to vote as well.


Proposal Recipient Disclaimer: The proposal recipient will be @steem.dao, funds will be returned to the SPS pool, the purpose of the proposal is to achieve voting consensus either IN FAVOUR or AGAINST the 4 week powerdown change.

Beneficiary Disclaimer: This is a 100% 🔥Burnpost🔥!

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I'm all for four weeks or even one week. I don't think it is demonstrated that these long lockups provide clear benefit at the system level. Yes there are benefits to an individual whose account gets hacked, but these come at a cost of adding dead weight (which then contributes to everyone losing 99%+ of value) to the system as a while. I'm not sure that is a good trade-off.

If people want a longer lock-up for security purposes then perhaps the savings account feature which has never been used much can be repurposed to a voluntary longer safety-focused lock up.

There are also other approaches to reducing hacks such as building in 2FA with a mobile app. Lock-up is not the way to do this.

I'm sure there are people who will deny that Steem's misfeatures such as long lockups and high inflation are responsible for its price decline but frankly speaking I think that is 99% bullshit. Yes it is a bear market and yes crypto coin prices can have a mind of their own, but most of the reasons Steem has declined from a top 10 or maybe top 20 coin to barely hanging on in the top 100 are bad design and execution decision of our own making.

I am for less than 4 weeks, like just one week. Long powerdown was coupled with high inflation rate for SP in order to disincentivize liquidating STEEM. For the current economic design, I think one week is a better choice.

Thanks @clayop, please cast your vote on the proposal if you haven't already.

@proxy.token supports your opinion, and thank you for your voice as many Korean users think, Mr.@clayop!

Funny, I don't see anyone clamouring for lock-in periods with bitcoin. Or, really, any asset in the world. This stuff has been solved a long time ago with various methods of cold storage. I'd imagine hardware wallet support will be enough for most regular people. Not to mention, there's the account recovery solution and savings account. Even beyond those, there are better solutions. What more does one need, at the cost of negating all investor appeal?

Many of these "unique features" of Steem have failed. It would be prudent to adopt what has proven to work in the crypto market. There's a $240 billion market of tokens with no lockup, how much for those with 13 week walls, again?

I'm using my active-key quite often, especially due to the fact that Steem is a cryptocurrency that is being used, in comparison to Bitcoin, which most people simply hodl. So yes, there is a completely different level of security need for Steem.

There's orders of magnitude greater usage for Bitcoin. BTC transfers are worth thousands of times more than STEEM transfers every single day. Not to mention, Ethereum and its many ERC tokens have a far greater diversity of operations and transactions than Steem, as do other several other chains, almost all of which have zero lock-in. Or, EOS, which processes dozens of times the number of transactions as Steem, and has a (still unpopular) 3 day lock-in.

That's complete BS. Obviously the median transfer of BTC is higher, but most of it is through cold-wallets. I wouldn't hodl 100k or 1M in BTC in a hot-wallet. I would only access that wallet from a trusted souce very, very rarely. I would probably even have multiple wallets to reduce the risk factor and use a hot-wallet for most general transfers i.e. purchases.

Glad you are of the same mindset, please will you cast your vote on the proposal @
@liberosist

My vote is negligible, but I've voted anyway. To be clear, I would prefer to have a 3 days power down period, and have the payout period reduced to 24 or 48 hours. But 4 weeks is a step in the right direction.

To be clear, I would prefer to have a 3 days power down period, and have the payout period reduced to 24 or 48 hours

Haha, bad idear there.

Why would you want payout reduced? Then you'd only have 24 or 48 hours to earn rewards. Way too short. People don't log on every day to upvote things. If anything it should be longer for payout periods. The fact that you can only earn rewards for the 1st week is kind of shitty. It should be forever with payouts being made every X amount of days or X amount of earned Steem.

Steem isn't locked up, it's liquid, just like Bitcoin.

It's only Steem Power that's locked and I think it makes sense to keep Steem and Steem Power separate and distinct.

or even one week

So, you don't mind Bittrex staking its customers funds and using it to vote for witnesses, SPS and posts ?

Another good point. We're seeing it with EOS that exchanges are using customer funds for voting purposes.

Thanks @smooth, please cast your vote on the proposal if you haven't already.

There are also other approaches to reducing hacks such as building in 2FA with a mobile app. Lock-up is not the way to do this.

How exactly will this prevent any hacking from the blockchain level?

If people want a longer lock-up for security purposes then perhaps the savings account feature which has never been used much can be repurposed to a voluntary longer safety-focused lock up.

The savings feature works only for STEEM, not STEEMPOWER. Which means, in order to be "save", someone had to forfeit any rewards earned through vesting inflation or possible voting-rewards.


I get the point of the lockup currently being a somewhat dis-incentive. But we're not fixing the system, by turning a screw without asking whether or not the screw is at the right place or if the screw breaks if we turn it more.

How exactly will this prevent any hacking from the blockchain level?

I'm not sure what you talking about. If you mean bugs in the blockchain code, lock ups don't prevent that either. They prevent people who get access to keys (for example by exploiting the web site) from performing transactions. 2FA would provide pretty much the same protection.

The savings feature works only for STEEM, not STEEMPOWER

Yes, I was suggesting that it perhaps be changed to work in a more useful way since the existing feature is almost unused. Again, an experiment which failed, so we should move on and try something else.

by turning a screw without asking whether or not the screw is at the right place or if the screw breaks if we turn it more.

I don't agree we are doing that. IMO we are thinking about what could break and concluding that nothing would. In part we are also looking around and seeing what several hundred other active blockchain projects are doing and seeing that they do just fine without months of lockup in the base layer.

I don't agree we are doing that. IMO we are thinking about what could break and concluding that nothing would. In part we are also looking around and seeing what several hundred other active blockchain projects are doing and seeing that they do just fine without months of lockup in the base layer.

I don't mind the reduction of power-down if it comes with a dynamic model and increased the incentive to lock it up longer.

Yes, I was suggesting that it perhaps be changed to work in a more useful way since the existing feature is almost unused. Again, an experiment which failed, so we should move on and try something else.

The only thing that failed is a model with a fixed time of 3 days, which is just not dynamic enough. Imagine you could set whatever time you want, maybe with a hard-cap of 1 year or so. You could go as low as 1 hour or 3 hours, if you're a business who is doing some kind of escrow job or maybe 7 days, depending on your needs.

I don't agree we are doing that. IMO we are thinking about what could break and concluding that nothing would. In part we are also looking around and seeing what several hundred other active blockchain projects are doing and seeing that they do just fine without months of lockup in the base layer.

You mean what they're not doing. Am I that crazy for thinking that a dynamic lockup with higher APR will incentivize more people to lock-up their Steem? Who else got that kind of a system? Pretty much no other blockchain AFAIK.

I'd go for that. I'm here for the long haul and would readily lock in my SP for 5 years for a solid boost to vote weight and resource credits.

Ooooh, I quite like where this idea is going.

First time I bought and powered up it was for 104 weeks.

I don't mind the reduction of power-down if it comes with a dynamic model and increased the incentive to lock it up longer.

One obvious compromise, @therealwolf, might be to weight the share of ones inflationary reward with how many weeks one has chosen to lock down their stake with a range of one week to one year. This request for a shorter lock down request is obviously with investor types in mind. The only concrete reason given is that everyone else is doing it. My compromise would be for the benifit of HODLers like myself. 😎

Allow me to allow the math majors to figure out what the increase in inflation rewards would be as weeks of the lock down setting is increased on ones stake.

As the inflation rate is slowly decreasing, the benefit of the change would eventually begin to favor the investor types more over time. This makes sense as the token would be slowly decreasing in production at the same time.

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Why I was proposing the two staking pools is to cater to both short term and longer term investors.
Shorter term investors have more liquidity while still can participate in PoB and longer term investors who are willing to give up liquidity to show commitment by locking up have more power in governance.
The silly thing about the current system imo is that 13 weeks is such a tall commitment especially on crypto space to participate in PoB, one of our "unique feature". On the other hand, people with minimal commitment voting on the future of the chain looks like recipe for disaster.
If it's deemed to be too complicated to implement I suppose it's not worth it after all.

Custom duration lockup period that works with SP would be cool but It will never be implemented because it will never be on top priority lol.

If this proposal passes as is I am actually more in favor for 1 week instead chickening on 4 weeks, maybe I am too paranoid about exchanges voting. As for security... I guess we need to be more careful with our keys.

I think staking multiple pools, variable locking periods for security, etc. might be okay but I don't think they should be at the base layer. If we had even simple smart contracts like Bitcoin or perhaps even a tiny bit more powerful, then these sorts of features could be added as applications (and this is necessary for things like cross chain swaps, payment channels, etc.). That's obviously not going to happen in the next version but once we are done playing with SMTs, maybe we will start to realize that trying to satisfy every need at the base layer with hard forks needed for each and every change is impractical and foolish.

Ideal solution to me is where staking long period is not only a security feature but also grants more power for witness voting and SPS by giving up liquidity. Ideally will be like 1 week stake have x1 vote multiplier, 2 week stake have x2 vote multiplier, and so on. If staking for a long period have no incentive whatsoever might as well have minimum stake period.

I agree that reducing the lock up period to 4 weeks is going to be a positive change. 13 weeks seems to be a huge amount of time. If an uptrend starts and you want to unstake then at the current situation would be a waste of effort but while 4 weeks might be just right.

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Agree with you @smooth

One week power down should be enough to still feel safe and secured (as a user). However somehow I like idea of 4 weeks power down much more than 1 or 13.

Yours
Piotr

This isn't a frontend vs chain development problem. It's something that needs a blended approach.

I'm for the change if:

  1. Accounts must opt-in to the 4 week divestment rather than opt-out of it. The 13 week divestment is a security feature that prevents accounts from being instantly cleared out if compromised.
  2. It is treated like an advanced feature and not like a simple click of a button. Frontends should commit ahead of time to provide sufficient information to users who are selecting it.

We have to recognize that while we're aiming to improve our attractiveness to investors we're also reciting "mainstreaming" like a broken record. There's no way to mix advanced and basic. If we try we'll end up with something that doesn't work for anyone.

There are rolling waves of phishing and hacking on Steem. We recently suppressed one such wave. Accounts that are compromised may not know they are compromised as they rely on posting authority through myriad dapps, which does not inform them something is wrong when the hacker changes their keys. It usually takes up to a week for an account to notice they are hacked and their funds are being moved. If they lose a quarter of their powered up STEEM the results to those investors and to the retention of same would be devastating. There's this perception that most phishing victims are new users with no investment. That's false. Most of the victims were active for months if not years and either accumulated or invested their stake. The largest hack (irrecoverable) was about 36k STEEM and the next one down, from an account that then invested and became a whale, was 10k. The opt-in should have a timer of at least 7 days but preferably 30 days, same as other key functions, before the opt-in takes effect. That would add another layer of protection.

Other forms of exploitation that we like to call "abuse" are highly likely to occur but shouldn't preclude implementation. Removal of a capability to halt a potential minor risk isn't the correct response in my opinion. I treat phishing/hacking as a major risk, for the record. Those who haven't been victims yet may disagree but anyone can be next.

At the same time the 4 week schedule holds merit for advanced users who know how to safeguard and monitor their wallets and are active traders. Tying up capital that can be used for trading is pretty stupid. Tying up capital is however necessary to outfit projects and to obviously perform basic functions like curation with any level of enjoyment. Those same advanced users should arguably have the capability to swap their trustee account and recover themselves if compromised.

Whether a divestment schedule change can attract investors is another matter. We're assuming that it will. It's going to take developer hours and a hardfork, both of which are expensive for everyone already invested and involved. Granted it can be bundled with the next planned fork, which would make it more acceptable to the ventures. It's still going to take time from the development team no matter how the code will be approached.

We need to answer the following before we start to the best of our ability:

  1. What quantifiable estimate of value is it projected to add?
  2. How will this change be communicated to new investors?
  3. Will it cause rapid divestment by the current investors?

I don't think we need to baby customers too much, there is inherent hack risk in crypto, bitcoin is way more popular than Steem and has no such safeguards. My ideal implementation would be 4 weeks defacto but have advanced features to increase number of weeks per individual choice, however this will make the code for this HF more complex and we want to keep it light because of SMT complexity already, big risk adding complicated changes to this HF.

I would agree except we are onboarding mainstream users.

I don't think we need to baby customers too much, there is inherent hack risk in crypto, bitcoin is way more popular than Steem and has no such safeguards.

LOL. Because BTC is treated differently than STEEM and people have different expectations from it. I'm using my active key quite actively, because I know that the worst that can happen is maybe 1/13 of my Steem being poof. With 1 week or 4 weeks, the risk of me not seeing when a powerdown happens or when someone has access to my active authority (for whatever reason) is far higher.

however this will make the code for this HF more complex and we want to keep it light because of SMT complexity already, big risk adding complicated changes to this HF.

Keeping it light aka. making it easy is a quick way to add tech debt. If the correct approach is to add a dynamic period, where existing accounts also have to opt-into it, then that is the approach we have to take.

Why should it take developers time to change a number in the code "13" to the number 4, instead. I'm sorry it might be slightly more difficult than that, but not by much. Seems like it could be done in a few days, at most.

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There are things that can conflict as a result. Although it seems simple its not.

Update: I'm not exactly strongly in favor, but I find it acceptable, as long as we're working on a solution that brings a more dynamic solution in the near future.


I'm not in favour.

Reducing it without thinking further is a move without any hindsight on what Steem is supposed to be. I'm not arguing that 13 weeks power-down is a stupid thing to have at this point in time, but reducing it to 4 weeks is just as stupid.

The same goes for this post. You don't start a discussion by initiating a vote. You start a discussion by stating the problem. And the problem is that the 13 weeks powerdown doesn't provide enough incentives, but removing it would hurt Steem just as well, or at least remove an important safety feature.

It is good to have Steem that is locked away for some period of time. Both for the individual and for the currency. It gives people that have locked away their Steempower some kind of safety due to the prolonged time until the currency becomes liquid fully. And on the other hand, it gives the community leverage over big stakeholders, as well as stakeholders more time to think, instead of acting on emotional decisions.

So, to summarize my stance:

  • I'm against this proposal or any proposal that simply wants to remove/reduce the powerdown period, without including future plans
  • I'm in favour of a dynamic staking period of Steem (also called Steempower), with ever-increasing incentives (similar to what dan larimer wrote here) If someone believes in STEEM and wants to lock it up for 2 or 5 years (because that's how long it takes for things to truly settle), why shouldn't we let them and give them a nice incentive on top of it?
  • I'm also very strongly in favour of a discussion on the future of the Steem currency. Do we need SBD? Should we have staked STEEM instead of Steempower? Should rewards earned by the rewards-pool have a longer staking period? (e.g. 1 year) Fact is: this currency was developed by people who were smart but not perfect. Removing things we don't like, without questioning the core philosophy will result in a currency that's as wonky as the tower of Pisa.

Dynamic staking would be a good idea. An investor committing to a higher divestment period than minimally necessary is taking a risk and showing their commitment to Steem. They should receive some sort of a reward for this.

The current system forces everyone to stake it for 13 weeks or lose out on massive APR, which obviously results in frustration. I'm pretty sure that investors like @theycallmedan, who is thinking in years - not months - would stake it for 1-2 years or maybe even longer.

I’m not in favour of multiple pools, as I mentioned above Steem is a different animal to EOS, we provide a simple normie friendly gateway to crypto, multiple pools with different staking cycles make the cognitive load immense, also as I said traditional shareholders of stocks don’t normally have a lockup period and still vote for the good of the company and don’t need to be imprisoned in their stakeholding to be invested.

A long lockup period shows weakness imo, even 4 weeks shows that we are scared our coin will dump so we have this 4 week buffer in place, it is however better than 13 weeks.

I like your suggestion to also think around other economic aspects such as whether we should continue to have SBD, if it remains broken and unpegged it is an embarrassment and should likely be deprecated, we should discuss that as well as a separate topic.

I’m not in favour of multiple pools, as I mentioned above Steem is a different animal to EOS, we provide a simple normie friendly gateway to crypto, multiple pools with different staking cycles make the cognitive load immense, also as I said traditional shareholders of stocks don’t normally have a lockup period and still vote for the good of the company and don’t need to be imprisoned in their stakeholding to be invested.

The vesting shares name and period were most likely created due to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock-up_period

And I completely disagree with you there. It's the UIs job to make it as easy as possible, while the underlying tech can have more complexity to it. And having different staking periods, with different ROIs is actually very easy to understand.

A long lockup period shows weakness imo, even 4 weeks shows that we are scared our coin will dump so we have this 4 week buffer in place, it is however better than 13 weeks.

No. It's just as bad. It's a different number, but the reasoning behind it is the same.

And again, you're forgetting the security aspect.

Lock-up period
A lock-up period, also known as a lock in, lock out, or locked up period, is a predetermined amount of time following an initial public offering where large shareholders, such as company executives and investors representing considerable ownership, are restricted from selling their shares.
Generally, a lock-up period is a condition of exercising an employee stock option. Depending on the company, the IPO lock-up period typically lasts between 90–180 days before these shareholders are allowed the right, but not the obligation, to exercise the option.
Lockups are designed to prevent insiders from liquidating assets too quickly after a company goes public.

Just to clarify would you be more in favour of a system where poweredup SP would have a shorter vesting period than earned SP? That would be a middle ground but unfortunately will require more coding than simply changing a parameter.

Multiple staking periods. And I'm not going to agree on middle grounds, the same way I didn't agree on your terms for the SPS funding origin.

Should we have staked STEEM instead of Steempower?

What is the difference?

Staked STEEM would be the same currency, similar to how STEEM behaves within the savings feature. Steempower aka vesting shares is a completely different currency.

I don't think the typical end user would see any difference other than the word "Staked" used instead of the word "Power". I'm not at all convinced one word is better than the other.

Most already perceive SP to be the same currency as STEEM in the sense of 1:1 value plus a little interest.

I actually don't mind the word Steempower, but is there actually a need to have a separate currency in the form of vesting-shares?

Having that we might make the next step and introduce the internal Steem/SP market, which should remove all the frustration coming from the longer lock up period.

This seems like an elegant, and almost weird loophole, would this make Lock up almost semi-irrelevant?

Yes, that's the idea)

Less confusion for new users, I would imagine. "Staked STEEM" is a lot more intuitive to a new user than a whole different name for the same thing (SP).

I had hoped to launch an SMT with 260 week powerdown in 5 instalments (paid out annually), and nothing else liquid. Curation, author rewards and any initial airdrops and sales would all come powered up; so there'd be no opportunity to buy or sell the token for the first 12 months.
All SMTs will be 13 weeks, though; which is a pity.
Maybe next fork.

Is this idea of @thecryptodrive getting any serious traction @therealwolf?

I don't know why @thecryptodrive offered this in such a rush and NEVER addressed your valid points and good ideas.

Either he's not thinking clear, not taking time to thoroughly address your comments @therealwolf or something else that I cannot imagine.

  • Dynamic staking would be an improvement IMO but cutting the 13 week Power Down with an ax without keeping a good incentive to take for a long period of time is not.

I’ve addressed everything in my comments throughout this thread, the fact is for this HF we can’t do anything fancy other than a parameter change from 13 to 4 weeks. It is already a code heavy HF due to SMT’s being added and adding complexity can introduce critical bugs.

I am only proposing a change to the length of period, fancy stuff can be done in a future HF. Steemit doesn’t have time to code anything fancy and there are many people who don’t want to delay the HF.

If we don’t take this opportunity to reduce the stake window likely we will have to wait another 6 months to a year for another HF.

Yes this proposal is getting traction, it is #1 on the proposals list with over 17 million SP behind it. That should be a good indicator of community sentiment towards it.

Is it possible to downvote the proposal or does it only calculate the upvotes?

Btw, you said that we can't do anything fancy in this next hardfork since Steemit Inc. Is doing SMT's but what do you call SMT's?

SMT's are already "fancy" and there's no need to throw a wrench in the progress by shortening the Power Down time when investors who want to buy Steem like Bitcoin ALREADY CAN!

  • That's what liquid Steem is for.

I mean no fancy code changes, all I propose is change from 13 weeks to 4 weeks, no other dual pool ideas and things. That can be done for this HF.

Ah okay.

I still disagree with fixing it in a rush like that but I get what you were saying now 👍

Please address more people who are not thinking this through @therealwolf.

I personally believe we are on track for a 100x to 1,000x run starting a month or two before the next Bitcoin Halvening just like last time..

But axing the 13 week Power Down instead of initiating dynamic staking could throw a wrench in it and surrender the Steem blockchain to exchanges 😧

I wish we had a 100x bullrun, the issue is we can’t rely on past data, Steem was newer then. and was touted to be the facebook/reddit killer, the market is somewhat disillusioned about Steemit.com never really improving in 3 years, and it is now longer a novel concept, as much as i wish for such a run, I’m not naive enough to believe it. A 2x run is possible but maybe after jan 2020, things will slow now for end of year.

I don't call it niave to believe that Steem will run, and even 100x its current price around the time of the Bitcoin halvening.

I think it's actually obvious that it will happen when you compare Steem's current market cap to the market cap of Ethereum at $34 Billion yet it doesn't even have its own blockchain-based social network.

In fact, I think it was naive to think that having a shorter Power Down time would have prevented the previous downturn, and I also think it's niave to think that investors are being prevented from buying Steem due to the long staking time when anyone can buy Steem immediately without staking, just like Bitcoin.

P.S. I checked @therealwolf's comments and you never addressed his statements.. there was even one of his replies that was greyed out due to a downvote. You addressed the people in favor of your "proposal" though.

Do you still think it's naive to believe that Steem will run 100x from it's previous low of $0.11 USD?

In my opinion it's a horrible idea.

When an account is compromised with 4 week powerdown worst case scenario if it's recovered on day 28+ all its stake whether it's powered up or not are stolen (Is it even worth recovering anymore?). Even if its recovered day 7+ after it's stolen it loses at least 25% of its powered up stake while with our current powerdown period at worst case when it's recovered on day 28+ it only loses 4/13 of its powered up stake, a little more than 30%. After 30 days of course you lose the account to the hacker on both cases.
Shortening powerdown is also bad because how our hardfork works. 4 weeks is not too bad (still worse than 13 weeks), but 1 week is plain horrible. If it's only 1 week exchanges will undoubtedly start voting for witnesses. You say our powerdown period is too long compared to EOS but they are having a huge governance problem. Even Dan Larimer is proposing staking pools with up to 10 years(!) lockup period and the 3 day lockup EOS tokens have 0 vote for BPs, the minimum lockup to have any vote for BPs is 3 month, pretty close with Steem right now and it seems like it won't have gradual weekly powerdown like Steem has. If an "investor" can't even commit to their "investment" for 13 weeks do they even can be counted as "invested" in the chain? If they just want to speculate on STEEM price that's what liquid STEEM is for, hold those instead.
The instant powerdown with burn fee is even more horrible idea. Now instead of losing 25% of your powered up stake each week when your account is compromised you lose 100% right away, GG!
However, I agree that in order to participate in PoB someone shouldn't be forced to lock up their capital for 13 weeks.

Here are my proposed changes instead:

  • 2 separate staking pools
  • The first pool has 1 week powerdown (even better than 1 month) and the second pool has 13 weeks powerdown
  • Entitlements of the first pool: VP and RC
  • Entitlements of the second pool: VP, RC, Witness vote, SPS vote, etc. (The benefits of SP right now).
  • Delegations works as if the pools are mixed. (You can delegate 210 STEEM away if you have 100 STEEM staked on the first pool and 110 STEEM staked on the second pool). Delegations delegate VP and RC like how it works right now and will interact with the RC delegation pool however it works in the next hardfork.
  • SP reward on posts can go to first pool or the second according to witness consensus. The name of each pool should be discussed with the community (only one of them keeps the name SP).
  • Stake on first pool can be converted to the second pool instantly but not the other way around (similar to Dan Larimer's proposal).
  • Current SP can be converted to first pool or the second pool on hardfork according to witness consensus. Each has their benefits and drawbacks. If it's converted to the first pool non-committed people gets weeded out really fast as they won't be converting their stake into the second pool but witness votes basically reset to zero and may cause instability in governance and block production for a short term. Converting to second pool is safer but will take 13 week correction time until it shows the results of the previous way. Of course we can assign a ratio too (like 90% goes to the first pool and 10% goes to the second pool) and have the benefits of both but needs a little longer implementation time.
  • When these separate pools is implemented I think making the second pool powerdown period even longer than 13 week can be considered if we want to see more committed witness voters and more protection when an account is compromised.

Yes, these changes will be complicated to code but I think this is the way to go instead of simply reducing the powerdown period to please the so-called "investors" which in my opinion is very shortsighted .

That's my thoughts on this.

Way too complicated IMO. Just not worth even close to that level of mechanism for something (lock up) that is very minor to the platform overall.

If someone were building a system like Steem today it would not have 13 week lockup and certainly would not have the 2 year lockup that was originally there (and for which reducing to 13 weeks was proposed as a compromise). It would probably have a few days to possibly a few weeks of lockup, or maybe none.

These were experimental ideas, worth a try, but really did not demonstrate any clear benefits, did not catch on more broadly, and should be left behind.

Good point you've made about the safety issue regarding power-down time. Also, having two separate staking pools is too rigid and we should have more than that. 13 weeks was a somewhat random number. Having a dynamic range (e.g. 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, 2 years, 5 years) would satisfy more people.

I mean at least it's still more flexible than just 1 staking pool we have right now. With those dynamic ranges I am guessing you want to incentive longer staking the same way in Dan's proposal? In my opinion there will be conflict of interest between 1 month stakers and 5 years stakers as 5 year stake have so much leverage against shorter stakers with less tokens invested and it will be way more complicated to implement and for users to undestand especially new ones, we have nowhere near as much capital as BlockOne for development, testing, and educating users. The two separate pools is compromise between our current one and Dan's proposal.
13 week is arbitrary, so does 1 month and 2 years previously. 7 day voting window is arbitrary too. Arbitrary =/= bad. For the second pool period if the consensus thinks it's too long then shorten it next HF, if it's too short then prolong it next HF while the first pool period will simply follow the voting window period.

With those dynamic ranges I am guessing you want to incentive longer staking the same way in Dan's proposal? In my opinion there will be conflict of interest between 1 month stakers and 5 years stakers as 5 year stake have so much leverage against shorter stakers with less tokens invested

If someone decides to lock their tokens up for 5 years, then they obviously should have a higher return on their investment, than somebody who locks it up for 1 month. That's simple incentive theory.

Sure, but having multitude of pools like that still overcomplicates the implementation and horrible for user friendliness. It's not worth it at all to implement it like that even when voters acts ideally imo. To which pool does SP rewards on posts and curation even go?

Just because you might find it too complicated, isn't nearly a good enough reason to be against multiple pools. Steem can and should be complicated, the frontends shouldn't be and its their job to make it as simply as possible with their UX & UI.

The average user should only know: "rewards earned by posting & curating take x-months to power-down" and I can decide to stake my STEEM for 6 months to earn 10% APR or 2 years to earn 20% APR (rough example, numbers are random)

No, I don't think it's too complicated for me. Why do you think I think so?
What I'm concerned is the implementation will be significantly harder than having only two pools. We are nowhere near as big as BlockOne so we need to be more efficient. More efforts dedicated to implement the multiple pools are efforts not dedicated to improve, say, SMT v2 or other upgrades. It's up to you witnesses in the end.
I understand why you want multiple pools like Dan's proposal, you seems like the type who will stake whatever the maximum period to me.

How long SP-earned-on-posts-and-curation power down period do you think is the best?

That’s how bank term deposits work yes.

I think there also should be an option to have it powered up forever.

Yes I am all for a dynamic range, I would like to be able to set longer periods for the Steem I intend to hodl. The 4 weeks baseline is still good, we have even people asking for as low as one week in comments here. 4 weeks is also a familiar lockup period much like a 30 day term deposit.

Just thinking out loud here, but could a security feature be implemented that would only allow an account to send powered down steem to a beneficiary account specified by the user unless a certain length of time passes. For instance, you could set a beneficiary account called @beneficiary or whatever. If you power down steem, that steem could only be sent to @beneficiary for 3 months. That way someone would have to hack two accounts to gain the funds and this would reduce the security risk for instant power downs. Once you transfer the funds to @beneficiary, they are unlocked and free to go anywhere, such as exchanges, etc.

And while more complicated, maybe it isn’t all that much more complicated for the general masses while still maintaining security?

Little bit complicated, also if the hacker gets the active key they can change that power down recipient account, unless u put it on a timer that takes 30 days to effect such change, a two account security feature may be too many keys for the average joe to think about and potentially lose. Currently there are vesting routes you can set with the active key.

The reasoning behind your comment is plain stupid. Sry. 99% of cryptos don't have a 13 week powerdown and they function perfectly well. Security? You offered such a fringe example that happens in 0.1% of cases here.

The 13 week powerdown is extremely detrimental to the price of steem and offers basically nothing.
Adjustment could be made for the person staking to stake for however long he wants or 2f authorization added.

All those things can be added as long as the 13 week powerdown is eliminated.

That's the single biggest culprit in steem being at 80th in mc

Do you not even notice that I propose 1 week powerdown alongside 13 weeks powerdown? I just want the 1 week lockup to not have any voting power for witnesses and proposals. if it's possible to keep PoB from being gamed without lockup at all then the 1 week powerdown can be eliminated.

In Steem we use our keys an awful lot compared to other cryptos. When this chain become more popular, if that ever happens, incentives to steal accounts will be way bigger than now, Compromised accounts will still be fringe cases but will happen a lot more often. 2F auth doesn't protect anyone that got their key(s) compromised unless it's implemented on blockchain level.

If custom stake period is implemented I want staked STEEM have vote weights for witnesses and proposals proportional to the stake period.

If someone doesn't want to stake their Steem for 13 weeks, can't they just buy liquid Steem?

I think you forgot to mention that Steem CAN be bought, just like any other liquid crypto like Bitcoin.

  • That is what liquid Steem is for and IMO there should be a clear distinction between liquid Steem and Steem Power.

Steem needs to be simple for users, we cater for more normies than EOS does so we shouldn’t get too complicated, Dan tends to make things too convoluted and technical for the average user. We already have 3 currencies on Steem, adding an extra pool is akin to having 4. I don’t think a 4 week pd schedule will create a governance issue, take for example a major shareholder in a real world company stock, there is no lockup period traditionally unless that was the terms given in a buyout or something but that won’t be common, investors in such stocks still exercise their voting rights for the good of their investment same as if you own a property in s body corporate, you can sell it anytime but doesn’t mean while you hold the property you will make malicious voting decisions at meetings.

The issue with EOS and alot of crypto is the quality of investors, no matter if the lockup is short or long, a bad acting large stakeholder can still help mess up the project.

For myself a short or long time period won’t change my decision making process, my investment in Steem is my time over the years that makes me invested.

I do like your point about the burn being a huge security risk and defeats the object of the security feature of the 30 day recovery period.

I also urge users to split their stake across multiple accounts and for ease of use can delegate to the main account. Having as shorter pd period can help users decentralise their holdings in this manner for increased security.

Steem needs to be simple for users, I agree. That's why I concede at two pools instead of Dan's wacky amount of pools. Normie users actually doesn't need to learn about the extra pool at all. If SP rewards for posts and curation goes to the first pool then they don't need to learn about the second pool unless they are interested in voting for witnesses and proposals. If it goes to the second pool users don't need to learn about the first pool unless they actively don't want witness and proposal voting power and prefer faster power down and don't mind the lower security. The choice depends whether you (witnesses) consider witness and proposal voting a "normie feature" or not. Users only forced to learn about both pools if post and curation rewards goes to both pools which I'm strongly against. While we are at it, I'm also proposing disabling SBD rewards entirely on posts next hardfork as the DAO already provides constant downward pressure to SBD price regardless of the debt ratio, this way normie users don't need to know about SBD unless they are interested about holding this particular stablecoin.

This is a tangent but no lockup in most real life companies is the very reason company's shareholders prioritize short term profits over sustainability and treats their workers pretty badly knowing when in near inevitable crash they can bail right away, even worse after crashing they cry to government to get bailed out to "protect their worker's job" while they have already bailed themselves and became shareholders on other companies (or simply keep their wealth from selling the stocks). Taxpayers get screwed too even though they have nothing to do with the company.
Yes, most stocks in real life companies don't have lockup period but having lockup period for governance voting forces the stakeholder looking at the best interest of the token value at least for the duration of the lockup. We are a blockchain community not companies. We have no workers to exploit as they can simply leave and we have no government to bail us out when we make a lot of bad short term decisions. One of the main reasons we have lockup period at all is so exchanges can't vote, the lower the duration the more vulnerable we are to that and this complements with the security issues I mentioned on the previous post too. Exchanges are not in for long haul, STEEM is just one asset they hold and it's not even theirs.

You agree that quality of investors of crypto is bad but you advocate for shorter lockup? If it's implemented like I proposed we can still market the lowered (1 week) staking period to new investors and if they want to get involved in governance they only allowed to play a long game. Where's the drawback? Most of our bad stakeholders now are due to ninjamine and/or only invested because of bad economics pre-HF21 anyway.

Sure, I believe you are a good actor but you can't just project your behavior to other actors. If a system rely on all its participant to act good it's garbage. Why are you even advocating shorter powerdown period if it doesn't affect your behavior whatsoever?

Yeah, keeping multiple private keys for multiple accounts where an account already have multiple private keys is totally user friendly. How about having a single account with higher security where 100% (or at least significant portion) of your stake doesn't get stolen within the account recovery window?

Steemit just needs to stay decentralised and thats pretty much it, oh and keep going. As for the power down i say keep it at 13 weeks. No reason other than in the real world 13 weeks lock up of your investment is nothing and second why encourage volatility in the Steem price.

I'm supporting this and also think the proposal that @theycallmedan has made repeatedly of allowing a penalised quick power down is well worth implementing if the security implications can be thought through properly.

How would you feel if someone would gain access to your active-key, and could steal all your funds in a week or two, while the bad actor would only lose maybe 20% (or however much is getting burned) from the potential 100%? You might be active around here right now nearly every day, but this is a serious security issue we have to carefully consider.

You could implement whitelisted accounts that funds can be transferred to that users can set. And maybe also implement 2fa. I would love to see power down lowered to one week. It is much needed and many in favor of.

Whitelisted withdraw addresses, if the withdraw address is changed, the users funds are locked for x time. And I agree, 2fa would be awesome and also help a lot.

2FA and Hardware wallet would be awesome. If we can get Steem listed on exodus wallet we will be one step closer to getting trezor implemented. First we need changelly or shapeshift integration, I should do a proposal for that s it costs around 20K listing fee.

I've always said we need a hardware solution for Steem. Might help with everything we are talking about now in this post.

The bad actor doesn't lose 20%, they gain 80% lmao.

The thing is most other crypto doesn’t have long lockups like Steem, there are other ways to protect your funds like split your stake over multiple accounts, a 4 week vesting period is still more protection than most chains offer, but I think we shouldn’t force long lockups on users and become a nanny state, offer a lower lockup period, long enough to deter exchanges from voting, ie 4 weeks is a good deterrent still, and then allow power users to lockup longer dynamically should they wish. Diff incentives for diff lengths of staking becomes complex and leads to more bugs that can occur, steem should be as simple as possible, SMT’s can be more variable and complex.

Another reason to have a lower lockup is to allow SMT’s to be more flexible to cater for more use cases, since SMT’s can’t have a shorter vesting period than the main token, makes sense to reduce the period on the main token to allow more SMT vesting options.

If exchange voting is s risk there are other ways to deal with that, make it an onchain policy that exchanges can’t vote and use an oracle that has a list of known exchange accounts that are excluded from consensus voting.

Ah and i just realised you were responding to the quick power down burn, I am also no longer in favour of that due to security risk of hacker insta-stealing your funds via the insta withdrawl burn method.

Yes I’m in favour of a lowered minimum vesting period with a dynamic options for people who want to lockup longer for security, only reason I didn’t include in the proposal was due to the added complexity, this HF will already be complex due to SMTs.

The quick powerdown based on burn was at first glance a cool idea but after more thought it totally circumvents any lockup period security, you might as well not have a lockup period for safety then if a hacker can get into your account and initiate a burn to get all your funds out.

Surely there could be a simple opt in and people who feel confident in their own ability to secure their accounts can sign up for high speed power down. Obviously after a 13 week wait that would kick and and the account would be marked as available for quicker power downs.

Sure anything is possible but adds to complexity of the chain because now you have to store the opt-in state of each account.

What if you would have to use the Owner Key instead of Active in order to make an instant power down with a burn? This way you wouldn't have to be worried of losing all your funds in case of some getting their hands on your Active Key.

We @proxy.token and KR community actively support your proposal ! Actually we want shorter powerdown period, but the four weeks you suggest could be the first step of that.

Thank you so much for your proposal, @thecrytodrive !!

An absolute pleasure, I think 4 weeks is a number most people can get behind and later we can reduce if this proves to be successful. Appreciate your support.

You did good job, @thecryptodrive. I'm happy I could support you with that proposal.

.... from Mr.Salmon.

Thanks so much for your support!

Your proposal must be passed at last! You did it! Congratuations!
We @proxy.token and KR community are all happy with it.
Thank u, @thecryptodrive.

Yes it has passed with your help, much appreciated. It would be good if a majority of top20 witnesses had also voted it, so far only 8/20 have voted for the change, ultimately witnesses govern the outcome, the purpose of this post was to create a central point to collect votes from both witnesses and the community. The fact that it is at the top of the list shows witnesses that haven't voted that the community is seriously behind such a change. I saw there was a user threatening to unvote witnesses who support the change, perhaps your community could support and vote for witnesses that do vote for the change.

Hi @proxy.token I saw you voted some new witnesses which moved my rank out of the top20. I was surprised I didn’t get your vote since we are aligned in improving Steem with the shorter powerdown period and my recent efforts with the @sbdpotato project to try fix the SBD peg. I can’t influence changes if I am not in the top20 so I ask that you consider voting me as well.

I am on board. Bottom line is this issue needs to be addressed because all new SMTs created will have the same power down time. If we already know we are going to reduce it from 13 weeks, we need to do it now as opposed to having a SMT Nightmare involving recreating SMTs and trying to airdrop new tokens, etc when we finally shorten the power down period.

Yes agreed we need to make the change on the SMT HF.

4 weeks is a good idea in my opinion 😀

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What is the need of decreasing the Power Down period when investors can always invest in liquid Steem at any time if they don't want it locked for 13 weeks?

This would certainly alleviate some fears for potential investors!

Great to have you here building, promoting and guiding Steem @thecryptodrive!

glad to see u back bro here is 1 peosp @peos privacy on eos token

Good stuff!

Can't investors buy liquid Steem at any time without ever having their Steem "locked up for long periods of time"?

I wouldn’t mind if it was reduced to 2 weeks tbh. Or even a week only

We can’t go less than one week otherwise can powerdown transfer to another account and vote twice. Some stakeholders don’t feel 2 weeks is enough for funds protection incase of a hack. Personally i would like to see a min period like one week with user defined longer lengths for those who want to lockup funds longer. For simplicity we won’t put that on the table for this HF.

I feel we could reduce the voting time. Given all of the experiments we've done (12 hours, 24 hours, 30 days, 7 days), the one that seems to have worked the best is 24 hours.

7 days isn't nearly long enough for people who want evergreen rewards, so they need to come up with another solution anyway, and after the first day or two of 7 days, diminishing returns kicks in and the amount of voting goes way down. Later votes are probably disproportionately used by scammers too.

i think 3 days is good enough to cover all timezones and people being offline on weekends.

Sure we can go to one week. Or even less. All it would take is the implementation of a rule that wouldn’t allow anyone to delegate nor to start a power down procedure unless they have been sitting on 100% VP. Sounds crazy?

100% VP is not easy to get to, especially if you delegate regularly, each time i delegate on dlease my VP reduces. But in any event we are wanting to keep the code overhead low for the upcoming HF, it is already very complicated with SMTs being added.

The savings on the wallet can be acting like the current powerdown system I think they should just switch it. Once one save fund come in 13 weeks while power down should be 3days

Posted using Partiko Android

You never addressed the issue of exchanges using some of their deposits to vote on witnesses if the Power Down length is to short.

You also failed to state that investors can invest in liquid Steem, just like any other cryptocurrency like Bitcoin without having to even stake 1 Steem.