Brainstorming How to Calm the “Proof of Brain Storm” (Part 1 -- Simple Version)

First Off, Message from a Newbie: “The Hive Community is Awesome”

First and foremost, I want to say that I have been amazed by the congeniality and helpfulness of all the folks I have interacted with over the past few weeks within the Hive community.

First, @theycallmedan graciously spent time explaining Hive to my students at Oklahoma State University.

Then, @aggroed graciously sacrificed time and treasure to help me create the GRAD token and the Gradnium tribe (which will initially be used by my students at OSU, then hopefully expanded to encompass additional students and additional universities).

On multiple occasions, @themarkymark has taken time to answer my newbie technical questions. He also dialogued with me in depth last night regarding my observations and concerns about what I viewed as the pending (soon-to-be actual) POB exploit.

Throughout the day today, @proofofbrainio patiently listened and responded to each of my numerous musings about how to potentially resolve the current crisis regarding POB token distribution.

Lastly, @no-advice’s willingness to simply give back the tokens from the exploit is yet another testament to the awesomeness of the Hive community.

Simple Solution

As I mentioned in a reply to @proofofbrainio’s earlier post, I have envisioned both a simple solution and a complex solution to this crisis -- and the two are not mutually exclusive. So this post will be devoted to the ‘simple’ solution.

My initial post-exploit suggestion (to @proofofbrainio) was to temporarily switch the power-down settings to 1 day, to enable @no-advice to immediately return the excess tokens, then those tokens could be directly distributed just as if the exploit had never occurred. However, I was informed that the power-down settings cannot be temporarily changed like that, meaning that the token distribution for the next month would be dominated by @no-advice’s upvotes.

So, even though @no-advice graciously agreed to only “curate quality content and not upvote his own posts” for the next month, I do not see that as a viable solution. There are just too many ways for that to go south. No matter how carefully and artfully @no-advice goes about curating content over the next month, there will be disagreements over the choices made and those disagreements would likely end up being harmful to the Hive community and PoB tribe.

This means (imho) that a ‘restart’ of some sort is needed. At a minimum, this means abandoning the original POB token (which can heretofore be known as “POB Classic” as @rxhector coined here) and creating a new one (or two, but that needs to be the subject of yet another post).

Benefits of a ‘Restart’

First, let me say that a ‘restart’ actually creates the opportunity to correct what many viewed as a significant shortcoming of the original token-distribution mechanism. The original whitepaper envisioned a system where there would be “no tokens issued to a founder or a team” but that there would be “a 10% beneficiary percentage when posting on proofofbrain.io” that would “be used to maintain proofofbrain.io.”

On the surface, that sounded like an ideal starting point. However, many folks noticed that even with @proofofbrainio only starting with 1 initial POB token, the leverage afforded by that 1 token resulted in @proofofbrainio amassing more than 85% of the first week’s distribution of POB tokens.

So, in order to correct for the exploit and fully instantiate the “10% beneficiary” vision of the original whitepaper, I propose:

• Creating a new token (e.g. POBx)
• Distributing 72,000 POBx (the current supply) as follows:
  • 7,200 to @proofofbrainio (= 10%)
  • 1,800 to @no-advice (= 2.5%)
  • 63,000 (= 87.5%) to everyone who participated in the initial launch of the tribe, with the tokens distributed proportional to the number of upvotes received prior to a certain cutoff date / time, such as 12:01 am, March 10, 2021 UTC (e.g. about 4 hours ago).
• As soon as the initial distribution of POBx has been made, normal voting can resume.

This is, of course, just a suggestion. I will follow-up with my ‘Complex Solution’ later; but as I mentioned previously, it is not mutually exclusive to this solution -- it merely adds another wrinkle that fixes (imho) a shortcoming that was inherent to the original POB plan.

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