Preface

Before we dive into this post that may or may not ignite a shitfest in the comments and potentially destroy any sort of support I'd possibly receive in the future from certain prominent large stake holders, I'd just like to say that I love HIVE, it's community and it's future potential. This post isn't meant to be hyper critical nor disrespecting to anyone in anyway, regardless of any perceived tone in the text below. I've done my best to write this in a way that removes my own personal emotion about this whole situation given I'm one of the developers that's been effected by these recent decisions.

I've also refrained from tagging people involved out of respect and knowing how annoyed they likely are from being tagged or "at'd" over this particular situation. Upvote to increase visibility please.

Defunding Developers to Fuel the HBD Stabilizer Initiative

After taking a week or so to really sit down and evaluate the "whole" situation and let my frustration and sadness about the whole situation it was decided to write this post to touch base on the current DHF situation and share them with our community and ultimately clear the air about this whole thing. Ideals expressed here are my own with tidbits of other community members insight sprinkled in that I talked with.. But also very likely mirrors a number of others thoughts and feelings here in the community, that perhaps aren't comfortable expressing their concerns out of fear of retribution or abandonment of support from the more heavily staked "ruling" class.

So for those unwilling to risk being struck down by voicing their concerns about the situation I will gladly be your martyr if it comes down to that. Although I suspect this post will not incite instant whale wars or cruel punishment to myself, but rather act to open up the potential for more truthful and free expression of ones thoughts on this whole matter. The hope is to find a middle ground where all parties win, with some sort of equilibrium being reached between burning much needed developer funding chasing a run-away peg function that sort of sucks with getting development proposal money flowing back into the people's hands who ultimately give HIVE it's value.

_{( I mention the "ruling" class here as the similarities to old Japanese feudalism is alive on HIVE, but far less "in your face" than classical feudalism of the bygone ages.. The take away here though is that atleast from the numbers and years of observation I've noticed these DPOS graphene based chains always result in a limited but powerful a class making decisions for everyone )}

Fixing a Fundamentally Flawed Peg Implementation

Reigning in the $1 USD valuation of HBD... A noble and perhaps outright insane pursuit. While in theory or blockchain has mechanisms to keep HBD amounting to roughly $1 USD worth of HIVE at any given time the true efficiency of these value pegging systems hover on the rim of "it kind of sort of works". While in theory it was seemingly a possibility to peg HBD to its mark, given the somewhat limited tools available to the network and its witness operators that were initially baked in to the software that runs the HIVE network, and the duration in which it's had time to assert a stable peg over said period, it seems almost silly to cut your developers funding in pursuit of an ideal peg that in all honesty has never ever truly performed it's purpose in the past and will likely not work in the future unless an overhaul and retooling of the mechanisms in place the network has to adjust effectively to market prices.

I'm not saying the HBD peg is a lost cause by any means, I think with some serious ingenuity and work it could be brought into standards of other pegged assets in terms of time to react to market, but as it currently sits, the systems in place, even with the @hbdstabilizer doing it's fund dumping, simply isn't going to be a viable way to tackle the pegging problem long term. Currently the experiment being conducted with the @hbdstabilizer while providing a decent amount of upwards pressure on HIVE price seems to not quite be the magic sauce HBD needs to maintain a peg, especially at the cost of a fair sized group of dedicated 3rd party HIVE developers income.

While obviously not something that can be rolled out quickly or even in the next hard fork we should be taking a serious look on how networks performing the pegging function in their ecosystem are accomplishing it and take some notes from their playbooks to optimizer our own lacking system.

Taking food out of the mouths of HIVE developers in favour of using the money to wrangle what ultimately boils down to a weak or flawed pegging system implementation just sort of sucks.

The peg has been sort of a joke over the past years, and while we've seen periods in the past where the peg has been holding somewhat as intended, the same can be said for times where the peg was way out to lunch and I'm entirely unsure what spawned the immediate interest or urgency now leading to the attempt we're currently seeing to prod the "baked in" lackluster pegging system into something closer to its original vision. When it boils down to the guys buidling out our ecosystem being paid or trying to fight a market which in all honesty we're entirely at the whim at regardless of how much HBD we dump on it seems like a no brainer you pay the folks building the empire over trying to make a historically weakly pegged currency back to its intended value amount.

Long Reaching Ripples of Developer Defunding

While it's damn near impossible to deny the excitement of the pursuit of trying new experiments in our ecosystem in attempts at taming market prices should it be done at the cost of developers livelyhoods? Now while not every developer currently writing code for HIVE depends solely on their income from their proposals to fund their development endevours there are many of us that do.

By choosing to pursue peg wrangling on the open markets over ensuring that the many 3rd party developers working here for the HIVE team are making a respectable income while developing the ecosystem out further may end up casting a negative connotation amongst large stake holders valuing the trivially pegged HBD price over having value being paid to individuals who are actively working to build out the ecosystem bringing orders of magnitude more value available to our ecosystem than any pegging of price will ever be able to. At the end of the day we're surrounded by examples of other graphene based networks sharing the same DNA as HIVE and their pegged currency having been left to it's own devices to do as it wishes having little to no negative effects on the other blockchains in question.. it starts to all boil down to a question of "where do the large stakeholders on HIVE place their priority?"..

Is priority of our ecosystem and its large stakeholders to strive to develop, evolve and grow by bringing new applications and completely unique to HIVE network services online, adding massive value to everyone involved in time.. or trying to fight free trade on an open market to make some basically inconsequential number behave like how Ned envisioned it or whatever?

These are some of the trains of thought that must be taken into consideration beyond what the experiment has shown us so far. While I do see some positive effect on HIVE price due to all the HBD being dumped on them and used to drive up HIVE prices, if its at the cost of our developers having to struggle financially or be forced to seek work elsewhere in lieu of funding being revoked to try some experimental and so far not terribly effective wrangling of prices on an open and volatile market then I think we're sending the entire crypto community the wrong message, not to mention potentially harming relations with developers already here on HIVE that were recieving funding only to be cut down at the knee because a number controlled by the markets isn't low or high enough..

Having a functional pegged currency would be cool, but paying our developers should be the obvious choice over it in all situations. Some of the developers here on HIVE are well off financially or high enough witness ranked they can afford to develop stuff regardless of having their DHF funding or not. Others like myself who perhaps aren't as financially stable as some are the ones who end up taking the brunt of the decision to favour pegging HBD over helping support them while they further develop our ecosystem. And yes, while the peg is far above its normal rate the DHF funded proposals take in supplemental income because of it, it should be mentioned that the folks who develop on here are the ones who ultimately hold the fate of HIVE's future and success in their hands... Not some known to be borked token price pegging scheme that's never really kept up.

An interesting thing to come out of this though was fellow HIVE witness and developer good-karma coming up with a script to pay back additional funds a proposal might take in due to the peg. I support this idea and think his implementation of this was a brilliant move in the right direction and effective immediately I'll be implementing this into my 2 proposals for Hive.Loans(5 days left @ $42/day) and the Hive Smart Chain(63 days left @ $120/day)

Continuation of Development Without Funding

It would be absolutely unfair and wrong to the community for me to outright stop development of Hive.Loans and the Hive Smart Chain projects due to the last 15 days or whatever of the Hive.Loans proposal and to say to hell with it all. I might be a bit more effected So with that being said regardless on if my funding is restored on Hive.Loans or the HSC project I'll continue forwards with them. One because Hive.Loans proposal has basically been paid for by the community already and secondly because the projects I'm working on both myself and with colleagues will change the landscape of our ecosystem in extremely beneficial ways.

However without funding priority in development queue and development time spent on them ends up getting canniblized as one is forced to seek out other sources of income to make ends meet. Certainly I'm not the only developer in the ecosystem that's come to this sort of stance and honestly I'd much rather be able to tell folks I'm paid to develop applications as a 3rd party through community funding support rather than having to tell folks I'm freelancing and looking for work.

So with this all laid out as it is. I'd like to ask that the hbdstabilizer experiment be dialed back a bit and get some of our development dedicated individuals back into their proposal support positions, getting some food in their cupboards, some wind in their sails and lastly a means of making HIVE a feasible employment option for those willing and able to come and put in work here, for HIVE, rather than have that talent drift off to greener pastures.

We got a lot of talented people here on HIVE, plenty of damn cool projects being built that will completely refactor what HIVE utility defines as.. But you've got to support the crews that support you.. And last time I checked HBD was just a mediocre financial tool that has very little meaning in HIVEs success in the long run. Pegging HBD will happen, but it won't be done effectively how it's being done now. HBD needs it's methodolgy and functionality used to maintain peg examined and corrected. And while that is being pondered at and worked on we can get our developers together, get them well funded and let them sculpt the future of HIVE through their efforts, supporting up the network that supported them. It doesn't take long for a few of these positive feedback loops to take hold within a crypto ecosystem and catapult it's value immensely.

That is what we should be focused on.
Return Support to Developers, Build a Massive Future Success.
or
Try and peg a token against a market that doesn't give a fuck.



Choice seems pretty obvious to me. :)
Thanks for reading folks. Got ideas, concerns or just want to vent? Hit up the comments!

PS. Hive.Loans alpha testing starts in the next week or two hopefully. :D

ᛒuᛋ Hᚼᛞᛊ ᛔᛜᛋᛇ!

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