Yesterday, the Spliterlands team put forth another proposal that generated a lot of controversies and generally negative and salty comments on the proposal post, at least when I checked it.
The proposal is not up for voting yet, but this may be another one hard to pass.
I sometimes wonder if the team puts certain controversial things on these proposals on purpose or if simply they don't think about the effect each paragraph they write will have. And I don't know what is worse between the two.
You guys talked in recent town halls about some sort of discord channel where weirdbeard will be gathering some feedback from the community or something like that.
Wouldn't it be better if you'd go through such a process with these proposals before you actually put them out into an official proposal post? That'll reduce the chances of them being rejected, maybe.
Now... about this proposal in particular.
If we read it at the surface, why wouldn't you like it, right? If you want to use DEC for some of the use cases listed in the proposal, to burn it at a later date (like guild building upgrades, land building upgrades and maintenance, land survey "potions", etc.), a 20% discount if you pre-pay for it, sounds advantageous, right?
Not only that, but you can pre-pay with either DEC or VOUCHER, and receive DEC-B (a new token, "DEC Batteries", if the proposal passes) in return.
DEC or VOUCHERs would be burned and DEC-B tokens will be received in return at a rate of 0.8:1 for DEC:DEC-B and 0.005:1 for VOUCHER:DEC-B.
In theory, if the amount of DEC burned through this pre-pay method is enough to move the price of DEC above the peg, it'll be a win because then the SPS burning mechanism kicks in and a lot of focus was put only to see this start working sooner rather than later.
Here's where pitfalls start.
For a reason I can't understand, the team decided to make DEC-B tradable in their proposed design. We know from experience you can't expect the market to do the logical thing and price DEC-B 20% less than DEC to avoid creating any extra inflation. And there will be plenty of speculators who will burn DEC only to get more DEC in return by trading DEC-B.
End result may be the reverse. More pressure on the price of DEC instead of moving toward the peg.
Then, this is a two-step process. There is no utility for DEC-B if this proposal passes until other proposals pass with specific use cases for DEC-B. At least one of those future proposals will be controversial enough that the team felt the need to mention it expressly in this proposal.
What happens if this proposal passes and none of the follow-up use-case proposals do? That's highly unlikely, though, because whoever votes yes on this proposal will need to vote yes on some use cases for DEC-B as well.
Personally, I would have voted yes on this proposal if DEC-B was soul-bound. In this form, I'll have to think about it.